Commentary on “Becoming Aware of Feelings”

“Emotion, which is suffering, ceases to be suffering as soon as we form a clear and precise picture of it.”

In their paper, Lane & Garfield present a cogent argument that elaborates on the above quotation from Spinoza. The authors develop the idea that the conscious awareness of emotion involves a domain of cognition separate from that of other cognitive processes, and that this emotional awareness has a therapeutic effect on patients who become conscious of their own emotions. They offer a developmental and modulatory perspective on the emergence of conscious aspects of emotion. The key proposition in their cognitive-developmental theory is that knowledge is transformed from implicit (i.e. procedural and sensory) to explicit (i.e. conscious thought) representation through the use of language and symbol. Lane's LEAS describes the move from implicit to explicit emotional experience in a number of stages. These stages involve the progressive differentiation of sensory and procedural emotional experience into more complex conscious symbolization of self-emotion and, at the highest level, integration of awareness of emotion of self and other.

They support this view with strong neuroscientific evidence. Focusing on vertical relations in the medial systems in the brain, they review evidence showing that cortical participation is necessary for emotional experience, and they argue that neural substrates of implicit and explicit emotional processes are dissociable. The amygdala has been shown to respond to stimuli in the absence of conscious awareness of the stimuli: it operates implicitly and is cognitively impenetrable. The authors then show that cortical participation is necessary for emotional experience, and they present impressive evidence from their own laboratory that implicates the ventral and dorsal anterior cingulate cortices in awareness of both background feelings and focal attention to feelings. They emphasize, however, that the latter area