This article demonstrates that emotion concepts—including the so‐called basic ones, such as anger or sadness—can be defined in terms of universal semantic primitives such as “good”, “bad”, “do”, “happen”, “know”, and “want”, in terms of which all areas of meaning, in all languages, can be rigorously and revealingly portrayed.The definitions proposed here take the form of certain prototypical scripts or scenarios, formulated in terms of thoughts, wants, and feelings. These scripts, however, can be seen as formulas providing rigorous specifications of (...) necessary and sufficient conditions (not for emotions as such, but for emotion concepts), and they do not support the idea that boundaries between emotion concepts are “fuzzy.” On the contrary, the small set of universal semantic primitives employed here (which has emerged from two decades of empirical investigations by the author and colleagues) demonstrates that even apparent synonyms such as sad and unhappy embody different—and fully specifiable—conceptual structures. (shrink)

Objectives: Habitually instigated exercise is thought to increase health behavior maintenance. Previous research has explored several aspects of habit formation. However, there is a lack of longitudinal research investigating affective determinants, especially post-exercise affective states. Therefore, the present study aimed to investigate a) if behavior frequency will enhance automaticity, b) if positive affect will enhance automaticity, and c) if positive affect will moderate the relationship between behavior frequency and automaticity. Methods: 226 participants (64% females, mean age 24 years) who attended (...) weekly sports and gym classes at two universities were followed for 13 weeks. Class attendance was documented on a weekly basis (behavior frequency) during the semester. Before, during and immediately after each class, participants filled in the Feeling Scale (affective valence). Furthermore, at the beginning of each class, they answered a question about their automaticity in arriving at the decision to attend the class (instigation habit). We used a two-level modeling approach to predict subsequent automaticity by the different constructs at the previous attendance. Results: The cumulative frequency of prior class attendance did not significantly enhance the automaticity of the decision to re-attend the class. There were significant effects of valence on automaticity on the between-subject level, i.e., a one-point higher mean valence score was associated with a 0.62 point increase in automaticity (p=.001). No moderation effects of affect on the association between behavior frequency and automaticity were observed. Conclusions: Behavior repetition, albeit not significant, and positive affective states at the end of an exercise class may be beneficial in building exercise instigation habits. Practitioners and researchers alike may thus want to emphasize the importance of behavior repetition and affective response for health behavior maintenance. (shrink)

This article presents the first systematic typological study of emotional expressions involving body parts at the scale of a continent, namely the Australian continent. The role of body parts in figurative descriptions of emotions, a well-established phenomenon across the world, is known to be widespread in Australian languages. This article presents a typology of body-based emotional expressions across a balanced sample of 67 languages, where we found that at least 30 distinct body parts occur in emotional expressions. The belly is (...) by far the most frequent, and a dozen others also have significant representation. The study shows how the properties of these body parts – e.g., whether they are internal organs or visible facial parts – partly determine which historical scenarios led to their linguistic associations with emotions, and in turn, their semantic and figurative properties. (shrink)

Recent application of theories of embodied or grounded cognition to the recognition and interpretation of facial expression of emotion has led to an explosion of research in psychology and the neurosciences. However, despite the accelerating number of reported findings, it remains unclear how the many component processes of emotion and their neural mechanisms actually support embodied simulation. Equally unclear is what triggers the use of embodied simulation versus perceptual or conceptual strategies in determining meaning. The present article integrates behavioral research (...) from social psychology with recent research in neurosciences in order to provide coherence to the extant and future research on this topic. The roles of several of the brain's reward systems, and the amygdala, somatosensory cortices, and motor centers are examined. These are then linked to behavioral and brain research on facial mimicry and eye gaze. Articulation of the mediators and moderators of facial mimicry and gaze are particularly useful in guiding interpretation of relevant findings from neurosciences. Finally, a model of the processing of the smile, the most complex of the facial expressions, is presented as a means to illustrate how to advance the application of theories of embodied cognition in the study of facial expression of emotion. (shrink)

This special issue presents developments in research on the cognitive mechanisms and consequences of surprise. Amidst much progress, surprise research has often been siloed, so, as editors, we have sought to juxtapose insights, theories, and findings, to support cross‐fertilization in future research. The present paper sets the stage by presenting a historical summary, highlighting contrasts in definitions, and tracing major threads running through this issue and the larger surprise literature.

Niedenthal et al's classification of smiles erroneously conflates psychological mechanisms and adaptive functions. This confusion weakens the rationale behind the types of smiles they chose to individuate, and it obfuscates the distinction between the communicative versus denotative nature of smiles and the role of perceived-gaze direction in emotion recognition.

This article introduces the somatic transform that operationalizes the relation between affect and cognition at the psychological level of analysis by capitalizing on the relation between the cogni...

Most academics agree that emotions and moods are related but distinct phenomena. The present study assessed emotion-mood distinctions among a non-academic population and compared these views with distinctions proposed in the literature. Content analysis of responses from 106 participants identified 16 themes, with cause (65% of respondents), duration (40%), control (25%), experience (15%), and consequences (14%) the most frequently cited distinctions. Among 65 contributions to the academic literature, eight themes were proposed, with duration (62% of authors), intentionality (41%), cause (31percnt;), (...) consequences (31%), and function (18%) the most frequently cited. When the eight themes cited by both academics and non-academics were rank ordered, approximately 60% overlap in opinion was evident. A data-derived summary of emotion-mood distinctions is provided. These data should prove useful to investigators interested in developing a clearer scientific distinction between emotion and mood than is currently available. (shrink)

In this paper I provide a description of the role of body-part terms in expressions of emotion and other semantic extensions in MalakMalak, a non-Pama-Nyungan language of the Daly River area. Body-based expressions denote events, emotions, personality traits, significant places and people and are used to refer to times and number. Particularly central in the language aremen‘stomach’,pundu‘head’ andtjewurr‘ear’ associated respectively with basic emotions, states of mind and reason. The figurative extensions of these body parts are discussed systematically, and compared with (...) what is known for other languages of the Daly River region. The article also explores the grammatical make up of body-based emotional collocations, and in particular the role of noun incorporation. In MalakMalak, noun incorporation is a central part of forming predicates with body parts, but uncommon in any other semantic domain of the language and only lexemes denoting basic emotions may also incorporate closed-class adjectives. (shrink)

The author proposes a dimensional model of our emotion concepts that is intended to be largely independent of one’s theory of emotions and applicable to the different ways in which emotions are measured. He outlines some conditions for selecting the dimensions based on these motivations and general conceptual grounds. Given these conditions he then advances an 8-dimensional model that is shown to effectively differentiate emotion labels both within and across cultures, as well as more obscure expressive language. The 8 dimensions (...) are: (1) attracted—repulsed, (2) powerful—weak, (3) free—constrained, (4) certain—uncertain, (5) generalized—focused, (6) future directed—past directed, (7) enduring—sudden, (8) socially connected—disconnected. (shrink)

This article presents six ideas about the construction of emotion: (a) Emotions are more readily distinguished by the situations they signify than by patterns of bodily responses; (b) emotions emerge from, rather than cause, emotional thoughts, feelings, and expressions; (c) the impact of emotions is constrained by the nature of the situations they represent; (d) in the OCC account (the model proposed by Ortony, Clore, and Collins in 1988), appraisals are psychological aspects of situations that distinguish one emotion from another, (...) rather than triggers that elicit emotions; (e) analyses of the affective lexicon indicate that emotion words refer to internal mental states focused on affect; (f) the modularity of emotion, long sought in biology and behavior, exists as mental schemas for interpreting human experience in story, song, drama, and conversation. (shrink)

Understanding the very nature of the smile with an integrative approach and a novel model is a fertile ground for a new theoretical vision and insights. However, from this perspective, I challenge the authors to integrate culture and race in their model, because both factors would impact upon the embodying and decoding of facial expressions.

College students (N = 162) listed activities that they found pleasurable, and provided ratings of the degree to which those activities led them to feel each of 12 different joy-related pleasurable feelings. A factor analysis revealed three types of pleasurable feelings: cheerfulness, contentment, and enchantment. Participants also completed a personality inventory, the NEO-FFI, and a questionnaire developed for this study to measure pleasure elicited by three types of activities: social, intellectual, and basic needs (e.g., eating and sleeping). Different types of (...) pleasure-eliciting activities were associated with different types of pleasurable experience, and the different types of pleasure-eliciting activities and pleasurable experiences were associated with different personality dimensions. For example, social activities were differentially associated with cheerfulness, and both social activities and cheerfulness were associated with extraversion; intellectual activities were differentially associated with enchantment, and both intellectual activities and enchantment were associated with openness to experience. (shrink)

Most academics agree that emotions and moods are related but distinct phenomena. The present study assessed emotion-mood distinctions among a non-academic population and compared these views with distinctions proposed in the literature. Content analysis of responses from 106 participants identified 16 themes, with cause (65% of respondents), duration (40%), control (25%), experience (15%), and consequences (14%) the most frequently cited distinctions. Among 65 contributions to the academic literature, eight themes were proposed, with duration (62% of authors), intentionality (41%), cause (31percnt;), (...) consequences (31%), and function (18%) the most frequently cited. When the eight themes cited by both academics and non-academics were rank ordered, approximately 60% overlap in opinion was evident. A data-derived summary of emotion-mood distinctions is provided. These data should prove useful to investigators interested in developing a clearer scientific distinction between emotion and mood than is currently available. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I address the question of how to construct scientific theories of emotions that are both conceptually sound and empirically fruitful. To do this, I offer an analysis of the main challenges scientific theories of emotions face, and I propose a meta-theoretical framework to construct scientific concepts of emotions as explications of folk emotion concepts. Part I discusses the main challenges theories of emotions in psychology and neuroscience encounter. The first states that a proper scientific theory of emotions (...) must explain all and only the phenomena under the vernacular term ‘emotion’ with a common set of conceptual resources and under an overarching generic concept of emotion. The second demands that each emotion category corresponds to well-coordinated sets of neural, physiological, and behavioral patterns of responses. I argue that none of the best contemporary theories of emotions in psychology and neuroscience overcomes these challenges. As a result, a new theory of emotions is required. In Part II, I develop the meta-theoretical framework to construct a theory of emotions that overcomes the challenges above. First, I propose a pluralistic account of scientific kinds based on different patterns of projection that various disciplines may take to justify inductive inferences. These are essentialist, historical, and social patterns. Each of these patterns provides a framework to construct different types of scientific concepts. I argue that among the frameworks for scientific kinds available, the one that is best suited to explicate emotion concepts is a functional framework. Consequently, I conclude by recommending scientists pursue functionalist theories of emotions over essentialist, historical, or social theories. (shrink)

To perceive an affordance is to perceive an object or situation as presenting an opportunity for action. The concept of affordances has been taken up across wide range of disciplines, including AI. I explore an interesting extension of the concept of affordances in robotics. Among the affordances that artificial systems have been engineered to detect are affordances to deliberate. In psychology, affordances are typically limited to bodily action, so the it is noteworthy that AI researchers have found it helpful to (...) extend the concept to encompass mental actions. I propose that psychologists can learn from this extension, and argue that human subjects can perceive mental affordances, such as affordances to attend, affordances to imagine and affordances to count. (shrink)