In recent years there has been a trend in philosophy and the cognitive sciences emphasising the importance of the body for cognition and consciousness. But what role does the body actually play in these processes? In this course we will consider this question with a specific focus on bodily feelings and their role in experience. We will first of all consider why one might think that processes outside of the brain might play an important role in cognition. We will then step back and consider a traditional question in philosophy and psychology: the nature of the relation between bodily feelings and emotional experience. Through engaging with some of the most well-known research in this field we will see several ways that recent neuroscience has proposed that feelings play a key role in both emotion and other kinds of healthy mental processes. In the final part of the course we will consider how the more recent understanding of how the brain processes feelings and emotion might relate to our more general experience of the world.

In this lecture, emotion research that has been conducted in the area of robotics is introduced followed by the explanation of social emotions. And then, research on social emotions in robotics and future perspectives will be discussed. In robotics, the study of emotions has been pursued for a long time. The popular research endeavors in robotics concern the study of robotic recognition, expression, and computational modeling of the basic mechanisms that underlie them. The advancements in research relevant to this domain are in accordance with well-known psychological findings obtained using the category and dimension theories. Many studies are based on these basic theories, which exclusively address the basic emotions. However, social emotions, also referred to as high-level emotions, have been investigated in psychology. I believe that these high-level emotions are worth the development of next-generation robotic systems---socially aware robots. A major issue is how to implement social emotions in robots while considering their relationship with basic emotions. I believe this will help elucidate the mechanisms underlying emotional development. I hope to better understand the morals of humans and robots through social emotions, and to explore ways which lead to a better future in which humans and robots can coexist harmoniously.

Significant changes in the experience of meaning are constitutive for the individual experience of depression. In order to explain at least some of these experiential changes of the evaluative self-and-world-relation of depressives, the model of the depressive situation (Jacobs 2013) will be introduced in the first part of the lecture. This provides the conceptual framework for modeling typical, i.e., clinically-diagnostically relevant impairments of affective, cognitive, and volitive abilities and their embodiments in clinical depression, which together shape the changes in the evaluative self and world reference of depressed individuals. The second part of the talk then focuses more on the affective changes in the depressive experience. Here, older research results of a systematization of so-called existential feelings and atmospheric experience in depression are presented, which represent an independent category for describing affective experience and are exemplified from a phenomenological perspective by a selection of patient narratives of clinically depressed individuals (Jacobs et al 2014).