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Abstract:
In recent years, there has been an increasing recognition of
the importance of emotion research and theory for an understanding
of human consciousness. Most all would agree that emotional qualia
are a nearly constant aspect of our phenomenal experience. Emotion
has been posited to play a necessary role in reasoning processes
(Damasio 1994), creativity (Csikszentmihalyi 1990, Nielsen 1998),
and any adequate neural network model of mind (Levine 1998, Taylor
1992). Some see emotion and consciousness as interrelated at the
most fundamental level, with emotion providing a kind of "global
valence tagging" that contributes to the gating and binding
functions of consciousness (Watt 1999). Adding to current interest
in emotion and consciousness, there has been a growing concern with
exploring the neural correlates of conscious versus nonconscious
aspects of emotion (LeDoux 1996, Panksepp 1998).
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