Commentary on "Towards a design-based analysis of emotional episodes"

The proposed architecture is relevant to a renewed AI, focused as it is on the problem of goal dynamics or motive processing, and on the problem of integrating reactivity and deliberation. It is particularly interesting from a psychological point of view, and is able to give us some important insights into human emotions, especially those emotions, like grief, that involve loss of control of management processes. We would like to stress the relevance of the intrusive character of grief-related contents; the rejection of certain beliefs because of the psychic pain they cause; and the second order motivations related to the control of the emotional state. However, some criticisms can be advanced about two core notions of the model -- perturbance and self-control -- as well as the treatment of grief itself, whose role in the general cognitive and motivational functioning of the individual is unduly restricted to a need for cognitive reorganization, thereby neglecting other possible affective and motivational functions of this emotional experience.