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Emotional Gestalts: Appraisal, Change, and the Dynamics of Affect

Philosophy Department, University of Waterloo

Josef Nerb

Psychology Department, University of Freiburg

This article interprets emotional change as a transition in a complex dynamical system. We argue that the appropriate kind of dynamical system is one that extends recent work on how neural networks can perform parallel constraint satisfaction. Parallel processes that integrate both cognitive and affective constraints can give rise to states that we call emotional gestalts, and transitions can be understood as emotional gestalt shifts. We describe computational models that simulate such phenomena in ways that show how dynamical and gestalt metaphors can be given a concrete realization.

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