HOW THE BRAIN PROCESSES EMOTIONAL STIMULI - AN INTRODUCTION TO LANGS THEORY OF EMOTION

The present paper presents an overview of Lang's theory of emotion. Fi rst, Lang's theory is presented in relation to the three mentors that he claims have influenced him: Arnold, Konorski, and Hebb. From this h istorical perspective, three critical issues pervading the study of em otions are examined: the concept of action tendency, the emotional seq uence and the two-factors organization of emotional behavior. The issu e of whether primitive neural systems, on which startle modulation is based, can ''read out'' the positive and negative valence of emotional stimuli, and hence their semantic meaning, is discussed. Second, Lang 's theory of emotion is examined in comparison to allied contemporary approaches, whose common goal is to achieve a correct description of t he emotional process through the study of the dynamics and the archite cture of the emotional brain. Family resemblances between Gray's, Ledo ux's, and Panksepp's theories of emotion are described. Substantial di fferences in the conceptualization of emotional behavior are presented . Two of these differences are discussed: the place attributed to cond itioning versus learning, and the range of emotion categories consider ed. Finally, the bio-informational perspective, a key aspect of Lang's theory, is briefly summarized.