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If the above simple starting point is a reasonable place to begin to develop a scientific concept of emotion states, the next question is what it is about these examples—the weeping per- son, screaming child or hissing cat—that distinguish them as evidence for emotion states. Many behaviors are caused by cen- tral states of various kinds: so what distinguishes emotion states? A useful comparison is with behaviors that are either simpler or more complex. Reflexes are simpler than emotional behaviors. Reflexes are relatively rigid and typically do not interface in a rich way with other psychological states—they do not need to interact with attention or memory, for instance. They just connect sensory inputs to motor outputs (the reality is more complicated, but let’s simplify for the sake of the ex- amples). So emotions are more complex than reflexes, they ‘de- couple’ stimuli from responses, thus affording much more flexibility (Scherer, 1994). Planned, volitional behavior, on the other hand, is more flexible and more complex than emotions. Emotional behaviors are not like that either—they don’t have that many degrees of freedom. Emotions regulate behavior at a level of complexity intermediate to that of reflexes and vol- itional behavior (Adolphs, in press). Charles Darwin had a simi- lar notion in mind when he wrote about emotional behaviors, ‘Nor