Abstract

This dissertation contains three standalone chapters, each of which addresses a different philosophical issue related to emotional assessment or emotion regulation. But each of these chapters contributes to the larger goal of understanding when and how we should regulate our emotions. In chapter 1, I examine what it means to say that an emotion is fitting. I argue that in order for an emotion to be fitting, it must do more than correctly represent its object; it must also mobilize the individual to correctly respond to this object. My analysis, which also leads me to argue that action-responses can be fitting, suggests that fittingness is not fundamentally about the correctness of mental representations. In chapter 2, I investigate the relationship between emotions, emotion regulation, and evaluative understanding. I argue that if our goal is evaluative understanding, we should regulate our emotions in a particular, organized way, that involves both engagement with our emotional concerns, as well as disengagement. In chapter 3, I investigate the claim that fitting negative emotions have a distinctive final value, for epistemic or moral reasons, that calmer mental states cannot possess. I argue that this claim is false. We can, and often do, downregulate our emotions without losing anything of distinctive epistemic or moral final value. I conclude the dissertation by briefly describing the structure of a practical, normative model for emotion regulation.