Contribution
The component process model’s answer to when an emotion is conscious. It combines three ideas. Appraisal has several levels and stops early when it can. Synchronization among components is costly. Conscious regulation is representational. The result is a functional account of why consciousness is recruited, attached to a neural hypothesis about how: binding by synchrony.
Key insight
Consciousness is the expensive fallback. Most events are dealt with at low levels and their emotional processing stays unconscious. Feeling arises when the episode is too strong and too lasting to be regulated automatically, and higher regulation has to work on an explicit representation of what is going on.
Assumptions
- Leventhal and Scherer’s three levels of appraisal (sensory-motor, schematic, conceptual), with consciousness required only at the conceptual level (p. 488).
- That the recursive loop of appraisal “stops when a conclusive result … has been achieved” (p. 489).
- Fries’s communication through coherence: “neuronal assemblies have to be in synchronization to exchange information” (p. 488).
- An analogy with vision, where binding by synchrony replaced the search for a single convergence centre (pp. 491–492).
Key results
A hypothesis with supporting evidence:
- Against rivals (pp. 484–485). Basic-emotion models leave the affect programs unspecified; dimensional models reduce emotion to self-reported valence and arousal. Neither says much about consciousness.
- The Venn model (pp. 486–487). Circle A is the representation of synchronized changes in a monitoring network; circle B, “only partially overlapping the first”, is the part that becomes conscious; circle C is what is verbally reported.
- Sequence evidence (pp. 489–491), from Grandjean and Scherer (2008, in press when this paper appeared): an ERP novelty map precedes a task–goal relevance map by about 50 ms; intrinsic pleasantness effects precede goal conduciveness effects; goal conduciveness has an induced-gamma effect near 600 ms. So novelty and intrinsic pleasantness “may be appraised early, on an unconscious, automatic, and possibly schematic level, whereas goal conduciveness tends to be evaluated later in the sequence, on a conscious, controlled, and possibly propositional level” (p. 491).
- Felt versus unfelt (p. 489). “Episodes for which participants reported a subjective feeling were compared with those that did not lead to a conscious emotional experience. Discrete wavelet transforms of the EEG signal in gamma and beta bands showed that significant differences can be observed between these two types of reactions.” Gamma differences were frontal and prefrontal (Dan Glauser and Scherer 2008).
- Unconscious appraisal exists (p. 492): blindsight, neglect, amygdala responses to masked faces, attention capture outside the focus of voluntary attention, for positive stimuli as well as for threat.
- The working hypothesis (p. 493). “The building of a conscious feeling requires the neuronal synchronization of local and distant specific neuronal assemblies to compute component-specific versus feeling-specific representations that can reach consciousness.”
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | Appraisal runs in parallel at several levels and stops at the first conclusive result | moderate | argued; consistent with the sequence data |
| C2 | Intrinsic pleasantness is appraised before goal conduciveness, and at a lower level | moderate | EEG studies (Grandjean & Scherer 2008); Lanctôt & Hess 2007; Aue et al. 2007 |
| C3 | Consciousness is recruited when synchronization is too strong and lasting for automatic regulation | weak | argued from cost; not tested |
| C4 | Felt and unfelt episodes differ in EEG gamma and beta activity | weak | one study, cited |
| C5 | Component synchronization and neuronal synchronization are jointly necessary and sufficient for conscious feeling | weak | hypothesis |
Concepts
- level of processing — sensory-motor, schematic or conceptual; later, costlier and more conscious in that order.
- preliminary closure — the point at which a check yields a result firm enough to send efferent commands; it fixes the sequence.
- component synchronization — coherence of changes across the emotion’s subsystems; its degree and duration drive consciousness.
- neuronal synchronization — phase coherence within and between neuronal assemblies, the proposed binding mechanism for the feeling.
Connections
States more fully the consciousness hypothesis that Scherer’s 2009 paper gives in one sentence (LIT-1451, NOTE-1113), and that Scherer and Moors (NOTE-1106) recast as a second threshold of coherence. Cites Thagard and Aubie’s neural model of emotional consciousness as consistent. The EEG sequence study it relies on, Grandjean and Scherer’s “Unpacking the cognitive architecture of emotion processes” (Emotion, 2008), is not in the record; the Archive ouverte UNIGE lists it as unige:97784.
Bearing on the record
Does the synchronization account rival CLAIM-439’s self-model condition? Partly. The two agree more than the title suggests, and they disagree on two points that an experiment could separate.
Where they agree:
- Feeling is a representation, used by further regulation. The abstract’s condition is that consciousness emerges when lower levels cannot “regulate the emotional process”. The mechanism is that “higher level regulation strategies, such as reappraisal, must kick in. These strategies require high-level representational operations and are therefore usually conscious” (p. 492). That is CLAIM-439’s condition in a different vocabulary: a deeper process represents the regime, and the representation is used elsewhere in the system (here, by reappraisal). The feeling is also, as in the 2009 paper, a monitoring representation of “the continuous patterns of change in all other components, as well as their coherence” (p. 486).
- The model is not sufficient. Circle B overlaps circle A only partly (p. 486). A representation of the regime can exist and not be conscious. CLAIM-439 adopts THEORY-662’s sense of “felt”, attended and available; Grandjean et al.’s circle B is meant as qualia. On their account the model may be available to regulation and still not be phenomenally conscious. That is QUESTION-059’s gap again, and CLAIM-439’s third defeater.
Where they differ:
- The trigger. For Grandjean et al., consciousness depends on a property of the regime itself: the degree and duration of synchronization, “a critical level and duration” (p. 484). Lasting high synchrony costs too much to be left to automatic regulation. On CLAIM-439, what matters is only whether a model exists and is used, and nothing says when one is recruited. So Grandjean et al. predict that weak or brief regimes are unfelt even when a system could model them, and CLAIM-439 does not. Read with TERM-076, their account says that strong and persistent potential is felt, which makes intensity and persistence, two of the term’s own clauses, conditions of feeling. That is a substantive addition the record could take, as a hypothesis about when the self-model is recruited.
- The content. What is represented is the components’ changes and their coherence, not which ordering wins or which way the system moves along it. Coherence is unsigned. A model of coherence alone could not carry the sign that CLAIM-439’s model must carry. Grandjean et al. get the sign from the appraisal profile, which is part of what the feeling integrates. So their model is richer than the record’s in what it represents (everything) and poorer in structure (no winner).
- The mechanism. They tie consciousness to neural binding by phase synchrony. CLAIM-439 is neutral on mechanism and holds for organizations. Their second mechanism cannot transfer to an organization, and the record should not import it.
So an experiment could separate them: an episode with strong, lasting component synchronization that a subject’s further regulation does not use (no reappraisal, no report-guided control). Grandjean et al. predict it is felt; CLAIM-439 predicts it is not. The paper’s own data do not tell. Dan Glauser and Scherer’s felt–unfelt contrast is split by report, which is the third circle, not the second.
The sequence evidence bears on CLAIM-438 too. Intrinsic pleasantness is early and “unconscious, automatic, and possibly schematic”; goal conduciveness is later and “conscious, controlled, and possibly propositional” (p. 491). That fits Berridge’s picture, in which ‘liking’ reactions can occur without felt pleasure, and it fits the reading in NOTE-1108 on which the record’s potential account covers goal-conduciveness valence. But it cuts against CLAIM-439’s felt-pleasure question in one way. If pleasantness is resolved early at a low level, then on Grandjean et al.’s logic it is the valence least likely to recruit a conscious model. Felt pleasure would then need either the later checks or the strength of the episode to bring it in.
Measures, for QUESTION-266 and QUESTION-268. Two are proposed: EEG band activity contrasted between felt and unfelt episodes, and phase coherence between regions as an index of communication. Both measure neural synchrony, not component coherence or which ordering prevails. Both are for organisms. Neither is a record of conduct of the kind QUESTION-268 asks for.
Limitations
The central claim (C3) is argued from cost and not tested. The “necessary and sufficient” conditions in the conclusion are stated, not derived, and the earlier sentence calls component synchronization “necessary but not sufficient”. The felt–unfelt EEG contrast rests on report. The levels are, as the authors grant, not specified beyond Leventhal’s three.
Open questions
Whether “critical level and duration” can be given a threshold that is estimated rather than stipulated. Whether the conscious representation contains which appraisal outcome is driving the episode, or only its coherence. Whether a system with no costly synchrony, such as an organization, could meet the first half of the account in some other way, for example through the cost of sustained conflict among its parts.