The way people come to report private stimulation (e.g., feeling states) arising within their own bodies is not well understood. Although the Darwinian assumption of biological continuity has been the basis of extensive animal modeling for many human biological and behavioral phenomena, few have attempted to model human communication based on private stimulation. This target article discusses such an animal model using concepts and methods derived from the study of discriminative stimulus effects of drugs and recent research on interanimal communication. We discuss how humans acquire the capacity to identify and report private stimulation and we analyze intra- and interspecies differences in neurochemical mechanisms for transducing interoceptive stimuli, enzymatic and other metabolic factors, learning ability, and discrimination learning histories and their relation to psychiatric and developmental disabilities.

Common folks “have” emotions and talk to others; and sometimes they make “their” emotions the topic of such talk. The emotions seem to be “theirs,” since they can be conceived of as private states (or events); and they can be topicalized, because we seem to be able to attribute or lend a conventionalized public form (such as a linguistic label or name) to some inner (and therefore nonpublic) state or event. This is the way much of our folk-talk and folk-thinking about emotions, the expression thereof, the role of language in these expressions, and communication in general are organized. However, as we have shown (Bamberg & Lindenberger 1984), such talk serves the purpose of communicating effectively and reaching mutual understanding.