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27 Pleasure, Pain, Desire, and Dread: Hidden Core Processes of Emotion Kent C. Berridge Elemental emotional states, such as simple pleasures, pains, desires, and fears, may seem irreducible, but they are not. Each contains dissociable psychological components, or core processes. This chapter explores dissociation ofcomponents lPithin elemental emotion, the relations between components, and their embodiment in brain systems. The core processes of emotion and motivation are essentially unconscious and not directly represented in subjective emotional feelings. For example, the subjective experience ofan 'emotion itself may be split apart into dissociable subjective components under a variety of circumstances. Core processes of emotion that underlie subjective experience can be further separated from subjective emotional feelings and occur without conscious awareness under limited conditions. For positive emotional states, core processes of«liking" and «wanting" are psychologically dissociable from each other. "Liking" corresponds to a basic sensory pleasure or hedonic activation. ""Wanting" corresponds to a different core process, the attribution of incentive salience to stimuli or events. Core processes of«liking" and «wanting" are mediated by different neural systems in the brain. «Liking" may be activated without «wanting" through brain manipulations . Conversely, "wanting" can be activated without«liking." The phenomenon of «wanting" without «liking " has special relevance for understanding the causes ofaddiction. Negative emotions involving fear and pain also are dissociable into core processes. Some of the core processes offear and anxiety may overlap lvith those of positive desires. In other words, positive and negative emotions may share psychological building blocks (such as incentive salience) even though the final emotions are experienced as opposite. A COGENT CASE can be made that the quality of life depends partly on the fulfillment ofcultural themes of life meaning, such as personal goals or relationships (Cantor, Acker, and Cook-Flannagan 1992; Cantor et al. 1991; Ellsworth 1994; Roney, Higgins , and Shah 1995 ). The quality of life is not reducible to its mere quantity ofpleasures and pains but includes purposeful, aesthetic, and moral considerations , too. Life is still a series ofpleasures and pains, however, some large and some small, and hedonic states determine at least one important aspect oflife's quality. Any appraisal of the quality of life requires consideration ofits affective tone. Since cultural appraisals of life meaning are relatively resistant to biopsychological analysis, I restrict myself here to the hedonic analysis qf basic emotions. I argue that even the simplest emotions, as we experience them, are not as elemental or irreducible as they seem. They contain multiple core processes . The nature of these core processes of emotion is not evident to conscious awareness and may not fit into traditional psychological categories . Evidence for these propositions is drawn both from the .cognitive and social psychology of subjective emotion (Fischman and Foltin 1992; Hilgard 1986; Kahneman et al. 1993; Murphy and Zajonc 1993; Zajonc 1980) and from the affective neuroscience of emotional processes in the brain (Berridge 1996; Davidson and Sutton 1995; LeDoux 1996; Panksepp 1991). DISSOCIATION OF EMOTION INTO UNCONSCIOUS CORE COMPONENTS Our conscious experience of emotion might be likened to the glimmering surface of a pond. We see only the surface of our own emotion. Below the surface lie objects and creatures within the pond-core emotional processes and their antecedents . Cognitive mechanisms of conscious perception must translate an event into active declarative representations in order to be subjectively perceived, representing the event, as the pond's surface represents what is below. What we know of the pond is what we see from above. But the view from above is distorted by ripples in the surfacenuances of the translation process-and by reflected light from above-the modulating influ- 526 Well-Being ence of cognitive expectation and appraisal. What is below the surface of our experience of the quality of life? What defines an emotion, for many psychologists as well as for most other people, is its conscious feeling. It is almost impossible to conceive of emotion in any other way. Most would agree with the view expressed by the psychologist Phoebe Ellsworth : "I have always found the idea ofunconscious emotions extremely difficult to think about ... [as] in most definitions of emotion . . . a subjective experience of feeling is an essential component" (1995,214). Emotion is nearly unique among psychological categories to the degree that we judge subjective experience of feelings to be an essential component . Unconscious motivations, memories, and even perceptions may be granted, but an unconscious emotion is more difficult to imagine. For memory, we are not conscious of the vast array of declarative memories that...

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