Which is right, the view that emotions are bodily perception, or the view that they are cognitive
appraisals?
We needn't choose. I think that the debate between cognitive appraisal and bodily perception theories is similar to two other classical debates about the mind: genetic versus environmental explanations of behavior, and top-down versus bottom-up accounts of perception. In each of these debates, both sides are partly right, in ways that start to become clear with the development of a rich theory of how dynamic interactions produce the full range of phenomena to be explained. I won't get into nature versus nurture here, but I have already sketched in chapter 4 how perception involves simultaneous, parallel processing that combines top-down knowledge with bottom-up perceptual input. Analogously, emotions can be understood as the dynamic interactions of brain areas that perform both bodily perception and cognitive appraisal.