Affective States Quotes

What all emotions have in common, and what distinguishes them from bodily appetites, is a focus on an object and a view of that object as salient for one's life.

I have spent a lot of my career working on normative political philosophy, developing the 'capabilities approach' to social justice. I have also spent a lot of my career working on the structure of the emotions, and their role in human life.

For there are two distinct sorts of ideas: Those that proceed from the head and those that emanate from the heart.

Attention without feeling is only a report.

When we talk about emotion, we really talk about a collection of behaviors that are produced by the brain. You can look at a person in the throes of an emotion and observe changes in the face, in the body posture, in the coloration of the skin and so on.

Colors, like features, follow the changes of the emotions.

Emotions are the interaction of thoughts and of sensations in the body.

There were several men who had blazed the trail for talking about emotions in philosophy; otherwise my work would have had even more opposition than it did.

I used to hold a unitary view, in which I proposed that only experienced happiness matters, and that life satisfaction is a fallible estimate of true happiness.

The attitude of physiological psychology to sensations and feelings, considered as psychical elements, is, naturally, the attitude of psychology at large.

If you're a gazelle, you don't have a very complex emotional life, despite being a social species. But primates are just smart enough that they can think their bodies into working differently. It's not until you get to primates that you get things that look like depression.

I did psychology at university, but I wouldn't say that my music is too influenced by it. The way I make music is a little more to do with an emotional connection. When I compose the melodies for my tracks, it always comes from the heart.

Pain and pleasure occur in consciousness and exist only there

[In studying history:] emotions are as important as objective circumstances and that they are usually inseparable from what can be counted and measured and seen.

I want to explore the range of emotions it is possible to feel.

So as I think back on it now, I think it is safe to say that music is something you both hear and feel. I also realize that feelings change frequently and that for the most part, they are not a constant. They change from high to low, happy to sad, content to ecstatic and back down again. Not all music has the same purpose, but most music makes you feel "something.