Enactive Emotion In Forensic Practice: The Application of Embodied Cognitive and Affective Science to Offender Rehabilitation Programs

In recent years, affective science has seen a shift in the understanding of emotion and its relationship to cognition. No longer is cognition viewed as the only significant factor in determining emotional experience, and as fundamentally distinct from bodily feeling. Rather than a linear causal relationship between one and the other, the philosophy and cognitive science of Enactivism suggests that the cognitive and emotional elements of experience, along with the body and surrounding environment, are constitutive of each other, and continuously influence each other in a dynamic, multidirectional manner to produce the experience of emotional patterns (Colombetti & Thompson, 2008). However, despite these advances in emotion theory, current rehabilitation programs such as the Reasoning and Rehabilitation (R&R, Ross et al., 2016) program continue to understand cognition and emotion as functionally distinct components of experience, with deficits conceptualised in mainly cognitive terms, and targeted through Cognitive Skills, which largely neglect the emotional elements of experience. This thesis explores how an enactivist understanding of emotion can be applied to offender rehabilitation programs, with specific reference to the R&R program. It is concluded that R&R and similar programs would benefit significantly from revisions to conceptualisations of cognitive deficits, and in treatment components, which should integrate emotional and cognitive techniques.