On The Automaticity of Autonomic Responses in Emotion: An Evolutionary Perspective

Abstract An evolutionary perspective on emotions emphasizes their function in promoting survival and procreation. Because meeting evolutionary challenges often requires vigorous behavioral responding, metabolic resources must be recruited as a support for action. For example, to escape the attacking predator, the potential prey must activate energy-demanding flight-or-fight responses. By modulating the state of the autonomic nervous system, the emotion of fear can assure that there are metabolic resources at hand to cope with dangers through defense responses appropriate for a given situation. Furthermore, if the organism can learn to utilize cues that signal emotional events, autonomic responses can be recruited well before the actual occurrence of the event that has to be coped with. From this perspective, the flow of emotion that is inherent in the interaction between an organism and its environment results in a continuous adjustment of autonomic effectors to meet actual or potential demands posed by the situation. Attended stimuli, including those that are sensitized by emotional states, elicit autonomic responses, often as components of the orienting response. These unspecific responses alert the organism and can then be channeled into more specific response patterns to assist emotional actions that are invited by the situational contingencies. An important point is that much of this finetuning of the autonomic nervous system to meet situational demands is controlled from information processing mechanisms that are inaccessible to conscious deliberations. Depending on circumstances, the body is automatically adjusted to meet whatever challenge may emerge. In this chapter, we start out by giving emotion an important role in the control of evolutionarily derived behavioral systems. Much of the burden on emotion in an evolutionary perspective is to recruit metabolic support for action via the autonomic nervous system, which we discuss with particular reference to fear. We go on to discuss the interplay between attention and emotion, using the orienting response as a bridge between the two domains. We then focus on how fear can become attached to new stimuli through Pavlovian conditioning. We particularly emphasize the role of evolutionary constraints on associations in Pavlovian conditioning and the role of nonconscious processes in the recruitment and learning of fear. Finally we integrate the findings on fear into a concept of a fear module and discuss how activation of this module provides input to higher cognition, such as decision making, and to the conscious experience of emotion.