Rolls on "The Brain and Emotion" BBS Call for Book Reviewers

Tue Apr 6 07:40:49 EDT 1999

    Below is the abstract of the Precis of a book that will shortly be
    circulated for Multiple Book Review in Behavioral and Brain
    Sciences (BBS):

       *** please see also 5 important announcements about new BBS
       policies and address change at the bottom of this message) ***

       PRECIS OF "THE BRAIN AND EMOTION" (Oxford UP 1998) 
           by Edmund T. Rolls

This article has been accepted for publication in Behavioral and Brain
Sciences (BBS), an international, interdisciplinary journal providing
Open Peer Commentary on important and controversial current research in
the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences.

Commentators must be BBS Associates or nominated by a BBS Associate. To
be considered as a commentator for this article, to suggest other
appropriate commentators, or for information about how to become a BBS
Associate, please send EMAIL by April 16th to:

    bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk

      or write to [PLEASE NOTE SLIGHTLY CHANGED ADDRESS]:

    Behavioral and Brain Sciences
    ECS: New Zepler Building
    University of Southampton
    Highfield, Southampton
    SO17 1BJ UNITED KINGDOM

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/
    ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/
    gopher://gopher.princeton.edu:70/11/.libraries/.pujournals

If you are not a BBS Associate, please send your CV and the name of a
BBS Associate (there are currently over 10,000 worldwide) who is
familiar with your work. All past BBS authors, referees and
commentators are eligible to become BBS Associates.

To help us put together a balanced list of commentators, please give
some indication of the aspects of the topic on which you would bring
your areas of expertise to bear if you were selected as a commentator.
An electronic draft of the full text is available for inspection
with a WWW browser, anonymous ftp or gopher according to the
instructions that follow after the abstract.

Please note that it is the book, not the Precis, that is to be reviewed.
It would be helpful if you indicated in your reply whether you already
have the book or would require a copy.
_____________________________________________________________

       PRECIS OF "THE BRAIN AND EMOTION" FOR BBS MULTIPLE BOOK REVIEW

           Oxford University Press on 5th November 1998.

        Edmund T. Rolls

        University of Oxford
        Department of Experimental Psychology
        South Parks Road
        Oxford
        OX1 3UD
        England.

        Edmund.Rolls at psy.ox.ac.uk

    ABSTRACT: The topics treated in The Brain and Emotion include the
    definition, nature and functions of emotion (Chapter 3), the
    neural bases of emotion (Chapter 4), reward, punishment and
    emotion in brain design (Chapter 10), a theory of consciousness
    and its application to understanding emotion and pleasure
    (Chapter 9), and neural networks and emotion-related learning
    (Appendix). The approach is that emotions can be considered as
    states elicited by reinforcers (rewards and punishers). This
    approach helps with understanding the functions of emotion, and
    with classifying different emotions; and in understanding what
    information processing systems in the brain are involved in
    emotion, and how they are involved. The hypothesis is developed
    that brains are designed around reward and punishment evaluation
    systems, because this is the way that genes can build a complex
    system that will produce appropriate but flexible behavior to
    increase fitness (Chapter 10). By specifying goals rather than
    particular behavioral patterns of responses, genes leave much
    more open the possible behavioral strategies that might be
    required to increase fitness. The importance of reward and
    punishment systems in brain design also provides a basis for
    understanding brain mechanisms of motivation, as described in
    Chapters 2 for appetite and feeding, 5 for brain-stimulation
    reward, 6 for addiction, 7 for thirst, and 8 for sexual behavior.

    KEYWORDS: emotion; hunger; taste; brain evolution; orbitofrontal
    cortex; amygdala; dopamine; reward; punishment; consciousness

____________________________________________________________

To help you decide whether you would be an appropriate commentator for
this article, an electronic draft is retrievable from the World Wide
Web or by anonymous ftp from the US or UK BBS Archive.
Ftp instructions follow below. Please do not prepare a commentary on
this draft. Just let us know, after having inspected it, what relevant
expertise you feel you would bring to bear on what aspect of the
article.

The URLs you can use to get to the BBS Archive:

    http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/
    http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/bbs.rolls.html
    ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/bbs.rolls
    ftp://ftp.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/pub/bbs/Archive/bbs.rolls

To retrieve a file by ftp from an Internet site, type either:
ftp ftp.princeton.edu
   or
ftp 128.112.128.1
   When you are asked for your login, type:
anonymous
   Enter password as queried (your password is your actual userid:
   yourlogin at yourhost.whatever.whatever - be sure to include the "@")
cd /pub/harnad/BBS
   To show the available files, type:
ls
   Next, retrieve the file you want with (for example):
get bbs.rolls
   When you have the file(s) you want, type:
quit

____________________________________________________________

         ***  FIVE IMPORTANT ANNOUNCEMENTS  ***

------------------------------------------------------------------
(1) There have been some very important developments in the 
    area of Web archiving of scientific papers very recently.
    Please see:

Science:
           http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/science.html
Nature:
           http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/nature.html
American Scientist:
           http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/amlet.html
Chronicle of Higher Education:
           http://www.chronicle.com/free/v45/i04/04a02901.htm

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(2) All authors in the biobehavioral and cognitive sciences are
    strongly encouraged to archive all their papers (on their
    Home-Servers as well as) on CogPrints:

http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/

    It is extremely simple to do so and will make all of our papers
    available to all of us everywhere at no cost to anyone.

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(3) BBS has a new policy of accepting submissions electronically.

    Authors can specify whether they would like their submissions
    archived publicly during refereeing in the BBS under-refereeing
    Archive, or in a referees-only, non-public archive.

    Upon acceptance, preprints of final drafts are moved to the
    public BBS Archive:

ftp://ftp.princeton.edu/pub/harnad/BBS/.WWW/index.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/Archive/

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(4) BBS has expanded its annual page quota and is now appearing
    bimonthly, so the service of Open Peer Commentary can now be be
    offered to more target articles. The BBS refereeing procedure is
    also going to be considerably faster with the new electronic
    submission and processing procedures. Authors are invited to submit
    papers to:

    Email:   bbs at cogsci.soton.ac.uk

    Web:     http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk
             http://bbs.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/

    INSTRUCTIONS FOR AUTHORS:

http://www.princeton.edu/~harnad/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html
http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/bbs/instructions.for.authors.html      

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(5) Call for Book Nominations for BBS Multiple Book Review

    In the past, Behavioral and Brain Sciences (BBS) journal had only
    been able to do 1-2 BBS multiple book treatments per year, because
    of our limited annual page quota. BBS's new expanded page quota
    will make it possible for us to increase the number of books we
    treat per year, so this is an excellent time for BBS Associates and
    biobehavioral/cognitive scientists in general to nominate books you
    would like to see accorded BBS multiple book review.

    (Authors may self-nominate, but books can only be selected on the
    basis of multiple nominations.) It would be very helpful if you
    indicated in what way a BBS Multiple Book Review of the book(s) you
    nominate would be useful to the field (and of course a rich list of
    potential reviewers would be the best evidence of its potential
    impact!).