Basic emotions,rationality, and folk theory

Abstract

Answering the question of whether there are basic emotions requires considering the functions of emotions. We propose that just a few emotions are basic and that they have functions in managing action. When no fully rational solution is available for a problem of action, a basic emotion functions to prompt us in a direction that is better than a random choice. We contrast this kind of theory with a componential approach which we argue is either a version of the theory of basic emotions or else leads to the doctrine that emotions are mistaken tenets of folk psychology. We defend the psychological reality of the folk theory of emotions, and we argue that universal basic emotions make it possible to understand people from distant cultures, and to translate emotional terminology from one language to another. Finally, we show how theories of basic emotions can be tested, and indicate the kinds of empirical result that can bear on the issue.     

Classifying emotion: a developmental account

The aim of this paper is to propose a systematic classification of emotions which can also characterize their nature. The first challenge we address is the submission of clear criteria for a theory of emotions that determine which mental phenomena are emotions and which are not. We suggest that emotions as a subclass of mental states are determined by their functional roles. The second and main challenge is the presentation of a classification and theory of emotions that can account for all existing varieties. We argue that we must classify emotions according to four developmental stages: 1. pre-emotions as unfocussed expressive emotion states, 2. basic emotions, 3. primary cognitive emotions, and 4. secondary cognitive emotions. We suggest four types of basic emotions (fear, anger, joy and sadness) which are systematically differentiated into a diversity of more complex emotions during emotional development. The classification distinguishes between basic and non-basic emotions and our multi-factorial account considers cognitive, experiential, physiological and behavioral parameters as relevant for constituting an emotion. However, each emotion type is constituted by a typical pattern according to which some features may be more significant than others. Emotions differ strongly where these patterns of features are concerned, while their essential functional roles are the same. We argue that emotions form a unified ontological category that is coherent and can be well defined by their characteristic functional roles. Our account of emotions is supported by data from developmental psychology, neurobiology, evolutionary biology and sociology.     

团队情绪研究述评及展望

团队情绪指不同团队成员情感成分的整合状况。通过搜索2000年以来国内外重要学术期刊的相关研究,介绍了团队情绪的组成成分以及团队情绪研究方法,梳理出团队情绪的形成过程,从团队情绪规范、不同情绪状态和特指情绪三方面回顾了团队情绪对团队产出的影响。最后总结了团队情绪的主要研究路径和研究方法,明确指出探索团队情绪这一重要心理变量将会深化团队研究     

Anticipatory emotions in decision tasks: Covert markers of value or attentional processes?

Anticipatory emotions precede behavioral outcomes and provide a means to infer interactions between emotional and cognitive processes. A number of theories hold that anticipatory emotions serve as inputs to the decision process and code the value or risk associated with a stimulus. We argue that current data do not unequivocally support this theory. We present an alternative theory whereby anticipatory emotions reflect the outcome of a decision process and serve to ready the subject for new information when making an uncertain response. We test these two accounts, which we refer to as emotions-as-input and emotions-as-outcome, in a task that allows risky stimuli to be dissociated from uncertain responses. We find that emotions are associated with responses as opposed to stimuli. This finding is contrary to the emotions-as-input perspective as it shows that emotions arise from decision processes.     

Self-transcendent emotions and their influence on organizational effectiveness: A literature review and synthesis

Self-transcendent emotions are positive emotions that arise out of other-focused appraisals. These emotions shift attention from the self to the needs and concerns of others. Limited work, however, focuses on self-transcendent emotions and the underlying cognitive and behavioural mechanisms by which they benefit organizations. We review the disparate streams of research on self-transcendent emotions and detail the thought-action repertoires of four self-transcendent emotions (compassion, gratitude, inspiration, and awe), explaining how each contributes to effective organizational functioning. Central to achieving this aim is the broaden-and-build theory. We show how the four self-transcendent emotions broaden cognitive processes and build the necessary resources leading to specific positive organizational outcomes. We conclude our review with four themes: (a) the importance of delineating levels of analysis in self-transcendent emotion research, (b) acknowledging contextual and cross-cultural differences shaping the experience of self-transcendent emotions, (c) addressing measurement concerns, and (d) the examination of other self-transcendent emotions. In effect, we synthesize the positive psychology and organizational behaviour literature, generating a framework that prompts theoretical and practical considerations for the role of self-transcendent emotions in organizations.     

Issues in the Pharmacological Induction of Emotions

abstract   In this paper, we examine issues raised by the possibility of regulating emotions through pharmacological means. We argue that emotions induced through these means can be authentic phenomenologically, and that the manner of inducing them need not make them any less our own than emotions arising 'naturally'. We recognize that in taking drugs to induce emotions, one may lose opportunities for self-knowledge; act narcissistically; or treat oneself as a mere means. But we propose that there are circumstances in which none of these concerns arise. Finally, we consider how the possibility of drug-regulation might affect duties to feel emotions.     

Emotional agency appraisals influence responses to preference inconsistent information

Bringing together the literature on emotional appraisals and the literature on biased processing in judgment, two studies investigate how incidental emotions varying in valence and agency influence decision making after exposure to preference consistent vs. inconsistent information. We show that emotions differ in their response to preference inconsistent information due to their differences in self vs. other agency appraisals, whereas no emotional differences were found in response to preference consistent information. Negative emotions associated with other agency appraisals increase resistance to preference inconsistent information whereas negative emotions associated with self agency appraisals encourage acceptance of preference inconsistent information relative to neutral conditions. We show this pattern reverses for positive emotions. These effects were driven by changes in confidence after exposure to inconsistent information and reflected in evaluative judgments. We discuss the significance of these findings for the emotions, preference consistency, and decision-making literatures.     

Personalization in Mother–Child Emotion Talk Across Three Contexts

An unexplored aspect of contextual variation in emotion talk is the extent to which the emotions mothers and children discuss relate to the child, mother, or another self. To establish the extent to which mothers and children personalize the emotions they discuss, we examined the emotion talk of 40 American mother–child dyads in three conversational contexts: reminiscing, book reading, and play. We found that both mothers and children talked about emotions directly relevant to the child mostly in the reminiscing context and about emotions relating to another self mostly in the book context. Interestingly, the discussion of personalized emotions did not significantly differ between the book and play contexts, but did for the independent emotions. The discussion of mothers' own emotions occurred with almost the same frequency in all three contexts. In addition, within‐context analyses revealed that while mothers discussed the child's and their own emotions in the book and play contexts at about the same rate, children focused on their own emotions significantly more than on mothers' emotions in all three contexts. We contextualize the significance of the results in light of intervention programmes and future research. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The semantic pointer theory of emotion: Integrating physiology,appraisal, and construction

Emotion theory needs to explain the relationship of language and emotions, and the embodiment of emotions, by specifying the computational mechanisms underlying emotion generation in the brain. We used Chris Eliasmith’s Semantic Pointer Architecture to develop POEM, a computational model that explains numerous important phenomena concerning emotions, including how some stimuli generate immediate emotional reactions, how some emotional reactions depend on cognitive evaluations, how bodily states influence the generation of emotions, how some emotions depend on interactions between physiological inputs and cognitive appraisals, and how some emotional reactions concern syntactically complex representations. We contrast our theory with current alternatives, and discuss some possible applications to individual and social emotions.     

Regulation of Positive Emotions: Emotion Regulation Strategies that Promote Resilience

The regulation of emotions is essential in everyday life. In this paper, we discuss the regulation of positive emotional experiences. Our discussion focuses on strategies aimed at maintaining and increasing experiences of positive emotions. We discuss the importance of these strategies for well-being, and suggest that cultivating positive emotions may be particularly useful for building resilience to stressful events. Then, we explore possible mechanisms that link positive emotions to coping for resilient people, with a focus on the automatic activation of positive emotions while coping. We conclude by discussing alternative models and proposing future directions in the work on positive emotion regulation and resilience.     

Infra-humanization: Ambivalent sexism and the attribution of primary and secondary emotions to women

Leyens and colleagues (e.g., Leyens et al., 2001) have observed that people are more likely to attribute uniquely human (secondary) emotions to the in-group than to the out-group. We examined whether males and females differentially attribute primary and secondary emotions to women. We hypothesized that individual differences in hostile sexism (HS) and benevolent sexism (BS), rather than participant sex, would predict the attribution of emotions to women. As expected, high BS individuals were more likely to attribute positive secondary emotions to women than low BS individuals. In contrast, high HS individuals were more likely to deny positive secondary emotions to women than low HS individuals. Participant sex was not related to the attribution of emotions to women after the effects of HS and BS were accounted for.     

Parent–child talk and children's understanding of beliefs and emotions

We examined the development of children's understanding of beliefs and emotions in relation to parental talk about the psychological world. We considered the relations between parent–child talk about the emotions of characters depicted in a picture book, false belief understanding and emotion understanding. Seventy-eight primarily Caucasian and middle-class parents and their 3- to 5-year-old children participated (half boys and half girls). The emotions talked about were relatively simple, but the complexity of the situation varied in terms of whether or not an understanding of beliefs was required to understand the emotion. Talk about the belief-dependent aspects of the emotions of picture book characters predicted children's false belief understanding, whereas talk about non-belief-dependent aspects of these emotions predicted children's emotion understanding. We argue that these data suggest that the development of children's understanding of beliefs and emotions is intertwined with learning to talk about the psychological world.     

前瞻性情绪作为社会风险的信息源假说：公共场景下风险决策的情绪及文化机制探讨

本研究从梳理决策的情绪理论入手, 在综合几种主要理论的基础上提出了“前瞻性情绪作为社会风险信息源”的假说。前瞻性情绪是在决策过程中产生的, 由于对决策选择的预期而感受到的, 进而影响决策行为的情绪。社会环境下的风险事件具有突发和稍纵即逝的特征, 如果一个公民对这类风险事件做出反应, 其结果的概率难于量化。在这种情况下, 前瞻性情绪能够为决策者快速提供有关信息, 并形成对决策预期结果严重性和可能性的综合表征, 从而成为公众场景下风险决策的有效线索。不同前瞻性情绪的组合在面对社会性风险事件时具有针对性的作用。近年来在文化比较中对于面子、荣誉和尊严文化的划分, 也为我们研究文化的情绪特征和行为效应提供了理论框架。本研究拟通过四项研究和多个实验探讨前瞻性情绪如何影响公众场景下人们的风险应对行为, 并对三种文化的情绪特征进行比较, 探索情绪性决策中个人因素、群体因素、及文化因素如何共同决定公共场景下风险决策(如亲社会行为或反社会行为)的发生与发展, 同时也期望为公共政策的制定及风险管理提供科学依据。     

The relationship between momentary emotions and well-being across European Americans,Hispanic Americans,and Asian Americans

Cultural differences in the emphasis on positive and negative emotions suggest that the impact of these emotions on well-being may differ across cultural contexts. The present study utilised a momentary sampling method to capture average momentary emotional experiences. We found that for participants from cultural contexts that foster positive emotions (European Americans and Hispanic Americans), average momentary positive emotions predicted well-being better than average momentary negative emotions. In contrast, average momentary negative emotions were more strongly associated with well-being measures for Asian Americans, the group from a cultural context that emphasises monitoring of negative emotions. Furthermore, we found that acculturation to American culture moderated the association between average momentary positive emotions and well-being for Asian Americans. These findings suggest the importance of culture in studying the impact of daily emotional experiences on well-being.     

The Role of Bodily Perception in Emotion: In Defense of an Impure Somatic Theory

In this paper, we develop an impure somatic theory of emotion, according to which emotions are constituted by the integration of bodily perceptions with representations of external objects, events, or states of affairs. We put forward our theory by contrasting it with Prinz's (2004) pure somatic theory, according to which emotions are entirely constituted by bodily perceptions. After illustrating Prinz's theory and discussing the evidence in its favor, we show that it is beset by serious problems—i.e., it gets the neural correlates of emotion wrong, it isn't able to distinguish emotions from bodily perceptions that aren't emotions, it cannot account for emotions being directed towards particular objects, and it mischaracterizes emotion phenomenology. We argue that our theory accounts for the empirical evidence considered by Prinz and solves the problems faced by his theory. In particular, we maintain that our theory gives a unified and principled account of the relation between emotions and bodily perceptions, the intentionality of emotions, and emotion phenomenology.     

Emotional responses to music: the need to consider underlying mechanisms

Research indicates that people value music primarily because of the emotions it evokes. Yet, the notion of musical emotions remains controversial, and researchers have so far been unable to offer a satisfactory account of such emotions. We argue that the study of musical emotions has suffered from a neglect of underlying mechanisms. Specifically, researchers have studied musical emotions without regard to how they were evoked, or have assumed that the emotions must be based on the "default" mechanism for emotion induction, a cognitive appraisal. Here, we present a novel theoretical framework featuring six additional mechanisms through which music listening may induce emotions: (1) brain stem reflexes, (2) evaluative conditioning, (3) emotional contagion, (4) visual imagery, (5) episodic memory, and (6) musical expectancy. We propose that these mechanisms differ regarding such characteristics as their information focus, ontogenetic development, key brain regions, cultural impact, induction speed, degree of volitional influence, modularity, and dependence on musical structure. By synthesizing theory and findings from different domains, we are able to provide the first set of hypotheses that can help researchers to distinguish among the mechanisms. We show that failure to control for the underlying mechanism may lead to inconsistent or non-interpretable findings. Thus, we argue that the new framework may guide future research and help to resolve previous disagreements in the field. We conclude that music evokes emotions through mechanisms that are not unique to music, and that the study of musical emotions could benefit the emotion field as a whole by providing novel paradigms for emotion induction.     

What is an academic emotion? Insights from Filipino bilingual students’ emotion words associated with learning

We explored Filipino learners’ concept of academic emotions by studying the words they use to describe their emotional experiences associated with learning. Two main theoretical frames were used as reference in the analysis: Clore, Ortony, & Foss’ (1978) taxonomy of emotion words, and Pekrun’s (2006) dimensions of academic emotions. We asked Filipino learners to describe the positive and negative emotions that they associate with their learning experiences using an open ended questionnaire. The 676 students used 1337 words which were classified into root word categories; 38 categories which were mentioned by at least 1% of the participants were included in the analysis. The interpretive analysis suggested that Filipino learners’ concept of academic emotions includes appraisals of cognitive and even physical conditions, beyond the typical affective conditions assumed in theories of emotions and academic emotions. Moreover, Filipino learners’ concepts of academic emotions include a wider range of emotion concepts, and may require additional characteristic dimensions, compared to what is being studied in current academic emotions research.     

Psychological resilience and positive emotional granularity: examining the benefits of positive emotions on coping and health

For centuries, folk theory has promoted the idea that positive emotions are good for your health. Accumulating empirical evidence is providing support for this anecdotal wisdom. We use the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions (Fredrickson, 1998; 2001) as a framework to demonstrate that positive emotions contribute to psychological and physical well-being via more effective coping. We argue that the health benefits advanced by positive emotions may be instantiated in certain traits that are characterized by the experience of positive emotion. Towards this end, we examine individual differences in psychological resilience (the ability to bounce back from negative events by using positive emotions to cope) and positive emotional granularity (the tendency to represent experiences of positive emotion with precision and specificity). Individual differences in these traits are examined in two studies, one using psychophysiological evidence, the second using evidence from experience sampling, to demonstrate that positive emotions play a crucial role in enhancing coping resources in the face of negative events. Implications for research on coping and health are discussed.     

Emotions and goals: Assessing relations between values and emotions

Whereas most current theories on emotions posit a central position to goals, direct tests of associations between emotions and goals have been sparse. We investigated such relations by comparing ratings of value importance and frequency of emotional experiences in daily life. The results confirmed our general expectation that associations would be found between values and emotions related to corresponding goals. We argue that data like these are fundamental to further development of emotion theory.     

Kripke,Cartesian Intuitions,and Materialism

A popular idea at present is that emotions are perceptions of values. Most defenders of this idea have interpreted it as the perceptual thesis that emotions present (rather than merely represent) evaluative states of affairs in the way sensory experiences present us with sensible aspects of the world. We argue against the perceptual thesis. We show that the phenomenology of emotions is compatible with the fact that the evaluative aspect of apparent emotional contents has been incorporated from outside. We then deal with the only two views that can make sense of the perceptual thesis. On the response–dependence view, emotional experiences present evaluative response-dependent properties (being fearsome, being disgusting, etc.) in the way visual experiences present response-dependent properties such as colors. On the response–independence view, emotional experiences present evaluative response-independent properties (being dangerous, being indigestible, etc.), conceived as ‘Gestalten’ independent of emotional feelings themselves. We show that neither view can make plausible the idea that emotions present values as such, i.e., in an open and transparent way. If emotions have apparent evaluative contents, this is in fact due to evaluative enrichments of the non-evaluative presentational contents of emotions.