Where does emotion collide?

William James's 1884 What Is an Emotion?, together with Carl Lange's parallel account, held that an emotion just is the perception of changes in the body. On this view an event triggers bodily reactions first, a racing heart, tensed muscles, a rush of breath, and feeling those changes as they happen is the emotion itself. James put it that we do not tremble because we are afraid but are afraid because we tremble, reversing the everyday order in which feeling seems to cause the body's response. Here an emotion is a bodily readout, grounded in physiology and felt from the inside, not a fixed biological category, the outcome of a cognitive judgement, or a concept the brain builds in the moment.[1]

Unit

One felt perception of a pattern of bodily change

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By the bodily changes it reports on, such as heart rate, respiration, and muscle tension, and by introspective report

Ekman's 1992 An Argument for Basic Emotions held that there is a small set of emotions, such as anger, fear, disgust, sadness, happiness, and surprise, that are universal across cultures and biologically basic. Each is treated as a discrete natural kind with its own signature: a characteristic facial expression, a distinct pattern of bodily response, and a rapid, automatic onset shaped by evolution to handle a recurring survival problem. On this account the emotions are given by biology and merely labelled differently across languages, so the same fear or disgust can be read from a face anywhere. Here an emotion is a fixed, inherited category with a bodily and facial fingerprint, not a raw perception of the body, the outcome of an appraisal, or something assembled anew in each instance.[2]

Unit

One of a small fixed set of discrete emotion categories

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By facial action coding, cross-cultural recognition studies, and patterns of physiological response

Appraisal theory, developed by Arnold, Lazarus, Scherer, and Frijda, holds that an emotion follows from how a person evaluates an event's meaning for their goals and well-being, not from the event itself. Lazarus's 1991 Progress on a Cognitive-Motivational-Relational Theory of Emotion argued that each emotion corresponds to a specific pattern of appraisal: whether the event helps or harms one's goals, who is to blame or to credit, and whether one can cope with it. Two people facing the same situation feel different emotions because they appraise it differently, and one person's emotion shifts as the appraisal is revised. Here an emotion is the product of a judgement about significance, indexed by the pattern of appraisals that produced it, not a direct reading of the body, a fixed biological category, or a concept the brain constructs from general feeling.[3]

Unit

One emotion, indexed by its pattern of appraisals

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By self-reported appraisal dimensions such as goal relevance, blame, and coping potential, mapped onto reported emotions

Barrett's 2017 The Theory of Constructed Emotion holds that emotions are not built into the brain as natural kinds but are constructed in the moment, when the brain makes meaning of general bodily feeling, called core affect, using learned emotion concepts. On this view no fingerprint defines anger or fear across every instance; the brain predicts and categorises signals from the body with concepts a culture has taught, so the same physical state can become different emotions and different states can become the same emotion. An emotion is therefore a category the brain applies, varying across people and cultures, rather than a thing waiting to be triggered. Here an emotion is a constructed act of categorisation, not a raw perception of the body, one of a small set of inherited kinds, or the fixed output of a particular appraisal.[4]

Unit

One instance of an emotion category the brain constructs

Recovery means

Not applicable

Measured by

By measures of bodily feeling and brain activity, and by variation in the emotion concepts people hold across cultures