Friday Philosophy Colloquium: Grace Helton

The Philosophy Department's Friday Colloquium, with guest speaker, Grace Helton (Princeton; cognitive science, epistemology, emotions). Title: Emotional Constancy (With Grief as a Case Study) Abstract: Grief after bereavement is sometimes thought to be a life-altering experience, of the kind one never truly recovers from. But recent results suggest that people who are bereaved typically grieve for relatively short periods. I look at a broad range of evidence, from neuroscience results to bereavement narratives, to consider how grief changes over time. Focusing on the emotion of sadness in particular, I propose that for typical adults, the capacity for sadness in light of a bereavement does not end but remains intact indefinitely. This is so even though this sadness is typically triggered more rarely over time and, when triggered, is weaker in felt intensity. At the same time, when triggered, this sadness continues to ‘say’ that the loved one’s absence is profoundly bad, not merely moderately or mildly bad. This is an example of what I dub an emotional constancy effect, wherein two emotions of different felt intensities can nevertheless ‘say’ the same thing. I consider what this result means for the epistemic value of grief over time.