Gloomy Duck or Cheerful Rabbit?

摘要

A great deal of Heinrichs' and de Sousa's replies to our paper was dedicated to challenging our use of the gestalt switch analogy to highlight the model of affective dynamics that we put forward in the paper and, regrettably, rather less to the point that we took to be its main contribution to current thinking about how to integrate recent theorizing in the philosophy of the emotions with the understanding of emotional experience that is prevalent in psychotherapeutic approaches. The paper's starting point was the accumulating empirical evidence against the effectiveness of cognitive interventions provided primarily by component studies of cognitive-behavioral interventions for anxiety disorder and obsessive-compulsive disorder. We saw psychotherapists reacting responsibly to this evidence by calling for greater investment in behavioral interventions. What we did not see anywhere in the literature was a theoretical explanation to account for the data. Our main contribution, we believe, was to advance that the perceptual theory of emotions could provide just this missing theoretical explanation.