What We Talk About When We Talk About Emotion

In this article I respond to commentaries of my review of latent versus emergent variable models of emotion. I note that Ross Buck’s view of emotion as stated in his commentary largely endorses an emergent variable model. Drawing from Dynamical Systems Theory, Camras frames the emergent variable model as softly-assembled attractor states. This implies that emotions are “fuzzy sets” of indicators that vary in the degree to which they indicate an emergent emotional state. Calvo offers affective computing as a method of evaluating indicators according to their incremental contribution to predicting human emotional responses. This innovative perspective holds a great deal of promise. Ultimately, I hope that this discussion has contributed to the field's understanding of emotion and emotional processes