How an animal reacts to a sensory stimulus is often used assess whether that can experience feelings such as pain and pleasure. This behavioural path typically complemented with reference how human would normally respond analogous stimulus. Together, these approaches lead “hard imagine otherwise” argument for feelings. It time go beyond qualitative assessments now determine nervous system execu...

Prior research suggests that the addition of mild pain to an aversive event may lead people to prefer and directly choose more pain over less pain (Kahneman, Fredrickson, Schreiber, & Redelmeier, 1993). Kahneman et al. suggest that pain ratings are based on a combination of peak pain and final pain. Similarly, people rate a happy life that ends suddenly as being better than one with additional ...

Are there any developments in neuroscience since 1920 that might result in a revision of the concepts of the repetition compulsion and the death instinct? The observation Freud made that there is a force, “More primitive, more elementary, more instinctual than the pleasure principle which it overrides . . . independently of it and to some extent in disregard to it,” is pursued by an examination...