An Integrative Dynamical Systems Perspective on Emotions

Within cognitive, affective and social neuroscience more and more mechanisms are found that suggest how emotions relate in a bidirectional manner to many other mental processes and behaviour. Based on this, in this paper a neurologically inspired dynamical systems approach on the dynamics and interaction of emotions is discussed. Thus an integrative perspective is obtained that can be used to describe, for example, how emotions relate to feelings, beliefs, desires, experiences, decision making, and to emotions of others. It is pointed out how this perspective can be used to obtain integrated computational models of such mental processes incorporating emotions. © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.