Pain and pleasure: Although the mechanisms for affect and motivation are separate, they causally interact

Pain and Pleasure. Murat Aydede. To appear in the Routledge Handbook of Emotion Theory, edited by A. Scarantino—Dec2018, v2.6. https://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/maydede/Pain%20and%20Pleasure.pdf

If you look at anybody’s typical list of emotions, you won’t see pains and pleasures among them. Indeed, even among the atypical emotions that people working on emotions regularly cite, pains and pleasures show uponly rarely. And yet, very few people will fail to acknowledge the critical, or perhaps the essential, role pains and pleasures play in our emotional lives. This chapter will explain the sense in which pains and pleasures are elementary forms of emotions.Let’s first distinguish pain and pleasure experiences, properly so-called, from their sources—typically, the physical objects, events, activities, etc., that cause such experiences. Smelling a rose is a pleasure, getting pricked by a rose bush thorn a pain —it is said. But it is primarily the experiences generated by these events that are said to be pleasant or painful. These experiences are mental events or episodes caused by various physical stimuli. It is harmless, in fact sometimes quite appropriate, to extend the terms to refer to such stimuli in most ordinary contexts as causes of such experiences. But here we will focus on pains and pleasures as experiences. As experiences, they are presumed to be conscious mental episodes.1

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Function [of affect]

One natural proposal is that hedonic valence is a “teaching signal”of sorts:18 it tells the agent to ‘want,’ or form a ‘desire’ to bring about, what is thus valenced —this involves, and for most animals, exhausts learning when and how to perform those sequences of actions similar to those that have actually lead to the obtaining of the valenced experience. Liking helps attribute incentive salience to environmental stimuli and sustain it (Berridge 1996, Dickinson & Balleine 2010). The sustaining bit is important. A learning-capable agent that acts out of an existing want or desire(learned, acquired, or otherwise) needs to somehow trackthe consequences of its behavior, that is, whether its actions result (or have resulted) in the satisfaction or frustration of its ‘desires’—generating more 'likes' or 'dislikes.' Plausibly, this is the other side of the same coin —of learning what desires to form on the basis of experienced valence. So, experienced valence is also a signal for desire satisfaction or frustration (cf. Schroeder 2004). Thus, although the mechanisms for affect and motivation are separate, they causally interact. We quite generally want what we like, and, more often than not, we like what we want.

Further research on he function of affect is likely to reveal in the future that there is a deeper unitary role affect plays in learning, motivation, and subjective wellbeing.


Impact
The discovery of dissociable underlying mechanisms has obvious important implications for a better understanding of affective disorders such as depression, clinical anxiety, and bipolar disorders as well as addiction and obsessive-compulsive behavior.For example, the well-received incentive sensitization theoryof addiction (Robinson & Berridge 1993, 2008) directly came out of hypotheses about the separability of affect from motivation —one way to characterize addiction is as a big increase in motivation to seek and consume substances that is vastly disproportionate to the increasingly diminishing affective payoff. The advances in basic affective neuroscience are poised to deliver surprising results about the causes of various emotional and affective disorders, which promises not only to greatly facilitate proper, faster,and more detailed diagnosis but also to offer huge potential for developing treatment options.There is increasing research on the extensive mechanisms shared by the brain’s default-mode network and the affective circuitry, both of which are connected, unsurprisingly, to pervasive affective disorders such as depression and anhedonia in general. There is evidence that optimal metastability in the brain’s large-scale dynamical oscillation plays a role in subjective affective wellbeing. (Kringelbach & Berridge 2017).19



Conclusion
Above, we had a schema about the general structure of pains and pleasures:

     [sensation or cognition or both] + affect20

The question to ask is: (Q) Does every instance of this schema yield an emotion?In the absence of clear and uncontroversial criteria about what qualifies as an emotion, it is hard to answer this question. If I rely on my pre-theoretical intuitions, I am inclined to answer itin the negative. But we all know that when it comes to emotions, people’s intuitions (pre-theoretical or otherwise) are all over the place. Perhaps we can simply stipulate that any sensory affect is an elementary emotion. This would be fine but it shifts the main research question in emotion theory: what, then, makes a mental episode into a non-elementary emotion?If we can set the sensory case aside in this way by designating them as elementary, perhaps we can identify all cognitive affectwith emotions? This suggestion is probably better —as all emotions are known to involve some cognitive uptake about what is going on in the environment of their emoters, which is usually not amodality specific affair and involves cognitive appraisals. But what about very simple forms of cognitive affect? For example, I’ve just learned there is less car theft in my neighbourhood this year than last year —I am certainly pleased that this is so. Have I undergone an emotion? Saying yes would seem to stretch the meaning of ‘emotion’. The best we can justifiably say, it seems to me, is that some pains and pleasures are emotions, some not—and leave it at that for present purposes.

The key point not to lose sight of is that the core brain mechanisms that generate negative or positive affectas attached to mental processes and the mechanisms connecting affect to learning, decision-making, motivation, and action, are the core building blocks of all emotions. We need to investigate what further elaboration of the basic affective processes is needed to explain the full range of emotions.2