Introduction

How does the activity of the psychological mechanisms proposed in the previous chapter (the network consisting of the fight-or-flight and care system; our FF-C network) influence the way people mentally represent, think, and talk about deviant conditions and the individuals associated with these conditions? Is the content of their thoughts about deviance, and about their emotional reactions and behavioral impulses felt, consistent with the operation of these mechanisms? In this chapter, we are not so much concerned with the bodily and experiential aspects of emotions, and with the motor aspects of “real” and observable behavior (these are examined in more detail in Chapter 4), as well as with the way people think and talk about their emotions and behavior with respect to deviance. That is, we will treat not only thinking or cognition, but also emotion and behavior, as products of the mind or mental content, and assume that the common language that people use to describe these products generally corresponds with their true internal representations, actually felt emotions, and observable behaviors. More generally, we propose that the same (language-independent) motivational mechanisms that are responsible for the content of representations of deviance are also responsible for the causal role of these representations in influencing bodily, emotional, and behavioral responses (see also Chapter 2, for a discussion of how our approach deals with the problem of mentalism).