Applying Systemic Design to the study of ‘emotion’

Emotion has proved a difficult concept for researchers to explain. This is principally due to both terminological and methodological problems. Systemic Design is a methodology which has been developed and used for studying emotion in an attempt to resolve these difficulties, providing a step toward a complete understanding of ‘emotional phenomena’. This paper discusses the application of this methodology to study the three mammalian behavioural control systems proposed by Gray (1990). The computer simulation presented here models a rat in the Kamin (1957) avoidance experiment for two reasons: firstly, to demonstrate how Gray’s systems can form a large part of the explanation of what is happening in this experiment (which has proved difficult for researchers to do so far), and secondly, as avoidance behaviour and its associated architectural concomitance are related to many so called ‘emotional states’.