Unconscious Pleasures and Attitudinal Theories of Pleasure

Risks deter but pleasures allure: Is pleasure more important?

The pursuit of unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking or binge drinking, not only carries various downside risks, but also provides pleasure. A parsimonious model, used in the literature to explain the decision to pursue an unhealthy activity, represents that decision as a tradeoff between risks and benefits. We build on this literature by surveying a rural population in South Africa to elicit th...

Desire-Based Theories of Reasons, Pleasure, and Welfare

How to Unify Theories of Sensory Pleasure: An Adverbialist Proposal

A lot of qualitatively very different sensations can be pleasant or unpleasant. The Felt-Quality Views that conceive of sensory affect as having an introspectively available common phenomenology or qualitative character face the “heterogeneity problem” of specifying what that qualitative common phenomenology is. In contrast, according to the Attitudinal Views, what is common to all pleasant or ...

Pleasures of the brain.

How does the brain cause positive affective reactions to sensory pleasure? An answer to pleasure causation requires knowing not only which brain systems are activated by pleasant stimuli, but also which systems actually cause their positive affective properties. This paper focuses on brain causation of behavioral positive affective reactions to pleasant sensations, such as sweet tastes. Its goa...

Attitudinal and non-attitudinal components of IAT performance.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) was designed to measure automatically activated attitudinal associations, free of the influence of processes that affect their expression. Subsequent research has shown that IAT performance also is influenced by non-associative processes, but the extent to which these non-associative processes are content-specific or if they operate similarly regardless of th...