Who Needs Emotions? The Brain Meets the Robot

asic principles for emotional processing 101
In the presence of fear-arousing stimuli, activation of the amygdala will
lead working memory to receive a greater number of inputs and inputs of a
greater variety than in the presence of emotionally neutral stimuli. These
extra inputs may add affective charge to working memory representations
and may be what make a particular subjective experience a fearful emotional
experience.
What kinds of emotional experience do nonhuman animals without a
well-developed prefrontal cortex have? It might be possible to have certain
kinds of modality-specific conscious state when the activity of one system
dominates the brain (LeDoux, 2002). This might happen with strong sensory
stimulation (loud noise or painful stimulus) or in response to emotionally
charged stimuli (sight of a predator). Modality-specific feelings can be
thought of in terms of passive states of awareness, as opposed to the more
flexible kind of conscious awareness, complete with on-line decisionmaking
capacities, made possible by working memory.
Although this theory of emotional experience is based on studies of
fear, it is meant as a general-purpose theory that applies to all kinds of
emotional experience. The particulars will be different, but the overall
scheme (whereby working memory integrates sensory information about the
immediately present physical stimulus with memories from past experiences
with such stimuli and with the current emotional consequences of those
stimuli) will apply to all varieties of emotional experience in humans, from
fear to anger to joy to dread and even love and appetitive emotions (Everitt
& Robbins, 1992; Gaffan, 1992; Hatfield et al., 1996; Rolls, 1998; LeDoux,
2002; Yang et al., 2002).
WHAT ABOUT POSITIVE EMOTIONS?
Other researchers have studied the role of the amygdala in processing stimuli
that predict desirable things (e.g., tasty foods and sexually receptive partners).
So what about love? The key issue is whether there is some way to
study the function in nonhuman animals that makes sense in terms of
human behavior. For fear, we were able to use conditioning because conditioned
fear responses are similar in humans and other mammals. The paradigm
for behavioral love has been to focus on pair bonding, in the sense of
a long-term bond between sexual partners. Application of this paradigm is
based on comparison of species in which animals do and do not pair up with
one another monogamously (Insel, 1997; Carter, 1998). Only about 3% of
mammals are monogamous. Even in nonhuman primates, monogamy is fairly
rare; but prairie voles, small rodents living in the Midwestern plains of the