Psychology Today

People experience nested emotions such as hope for forgiveness, love of honor, longing for love, fear of fear itself, lust for glory, and dread of shame.

Foreigners and locals decide to go to fight with the Islamic State because it provides a good fit with their fundamental values and beliefs – emotional coherence. A value map shows some of the emotional structure of the Islamic State ideology.

The best way to state the nature of love is to identify standard examples, typical features, and explanatory roles. Love is an emotion consisting of patterns of neural firing that represent a lover, a loved one, intense feelings, and caring behavior, all tied to chemical changes in the brain.

The Cinderella story illustrates a common pattern in which a victim experiences harm because of bad actions performed by a bad agent with bad intentions. I call this pattern the wrongdoing schema, and outline how it explains important aspects of moral cognition.

The theory that consciousness is just information integration suffers from vagueness, mathematical problems, naïve claims about self-evidence, and misattribution of consciousness to entities such as smartphones.So it is less plausible than alternate theories that explain consciousness as the result of brain mechanisms.

Some social and developmental psychologists have claimed that people—even children—naturally think like scientists. I find this claim implausible because: people are naturally religious rather than scientific; everyday thinking frequently deviates from scientific reasoning; and science is a relatively recent cultural development.

A new approach to explaining social change needs to combine recent theories about the brain processes responsible for cognition and emotion with understanding of social communication that is both verbal and non-verbal.

Philosophy and psychology should abandon assumptions that human minds are at all optimal or rational, and instead concentrate on identifying the neural mechanisms that make us good at but far from perfect for remembering, forming beliefs, making decisions, using language, and pursuing happiness.

Understanding decision making as a psychological process of emotional coherence provides a better explanation of why people often get so paralyzed by crucial decisions, which is mysterious on the economic model of maximizing expected utility.

Your self is not an immortal soul or a mere fiction, but a system of social, psychological, neural, and molecular mechanisms.

Human actions that result from complex neural processes of intention, emotion, and consciousness are at least freeish, even if they are not produced by the traditional kind of free will.

New thermostats are capable of sophisticated forms of inference, so it is worth considering whether they have beliefs.

Why is there often a gap between the intentions of people like Rob Ford and their actions? My radical view, based on a new model of how intentions in the brain lead to action, is that there is no free will because there is no will.

The origins of morality lie in a combination of brain and social processes that support caring, understanding, and social learning.