Some simulationists have argued that the information obtained during the perceptual process of facial expression (the geometric features) is sufficient for recognition of the emotion intended by that expression. Drawing on evidence from cross-cultural studies, with particular attention to conceptual act theories, I show that both emotion expression and recognition are top-down modulated by expressivity norms, observer-specific internal representations, and expectations. I thus conclude that direct simulation, or a purely bottom-up approach, is not sufficient for emotion recognition. Next, I will (...) consider the generate and test strategy as an alternative to direct simulation. This is a highly promising approach in that top-down and bottom-up processes work in parallel, according to the presence, or not, of additional information. For this reason, it avoids the difficulties of direct simulation. I will argue, however, that it is based on a misconception of emotions, specifically on how emotions are represented in the brain. To improve the model, I distinguish between two different categorical approaches to emotions, then argue that only one of which is viable in a simulational account of emotion recognition. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThe six basic emotions have long been considered discrete categories that serve as the primary units of the emotion system. Yet recent evidence indicated underlying connections among them. Here we tested the underlying relationships among the six basic emotions using a perceptual learning procedure. This technique has the potential of causally changing participants’ emotion detection ability. We found that training on detecting a facial expression improved the performance not only on the trained expression but also on other expressions. Such a (...) transfer effect was consistently demonstrated between disgust and anger detection as well as between fear and surprise detection in two experiments. Notably, training on any of the six emotions could improve happiness detection, while sadness detection could only be improved by training on sadness itself, suggesting the uniqueness of happiness and sadness.... (shrink)

ABSTRACTPosed stimuli dominate the study of nonverbal communication of emotion, but concerns have been raised that the use of posed stimuli may inflate recognition accuracy relative to spontaneous expressions. Here, we compare recognition of emotions from spontaneous expressions with that of matched posed stimuli. Participants made forced-choice judgments about the expressed emotion and whether the expression was spontaneous, and rated expressions on intensity and prototypicality. Listeners were able to accurately infer emotions from both posed and spontaneous expressions, from auditory, visual, (...) and audiovisual cues. Furthermore, perceived intensity and prototypicality were found to play a role in the accurate recognition of emotion, particularly from spontaneous expressions. Our findings demonstrate that perceivers can reliably recognise emotions from spontaneous expressions, and that depending on the comparison set, recognition levels can even be equivalent to that o... (shrink)

The recent philosophical literature on emotional action is divided between Humeans, who think that emotional action, for all its peculiarities, can in fact be explained along Humean lines, that is, with belief–desire pairs; and emotionists, who think that emotional actions can only be explained by appealing to emotions and some of their special features. After reviewing this philosophical discussion, I will argue, first, that none of the philosophical accounts of emotional action analysed, whether Humean or emotionist, is satisfactory enough. Second, (...) I will argue that this philosophical debate has reached a stalemate, which does not allow further progress and which has not been able to provide us with a compelling account of such emotional actions where it is not obvious which is the goal involved. Third, I will argue that in order to overcome this stalemate, we need to approach emotional action in a radically different way. Drawing on ideas from some psychologists, I will suggest that the relevant philosophical issue should be whether emotional action is, or is not, goal-directed. Finally, I will suggest how emotional actions, particularly the most puzzling ones, can be accounted for according to this new approach. (shrink)

Emotion-related words differ across societies and eras. Does this mean that emotions themselves differ in similar ways? Three perspectives on language-emotion relations suggest alternative answers to this question. A referential approach implies that any language's emotion concepts provide a potentially perfectible mapping of the emotional world. Constructionist approaches suggest that linguistic concepts shape culturally different emotion perceptions. By contrast, a pragmatic approach emphasizes the performative functions served by conversational uses of emotion words. From this perspective, emotional language is attuned to (...) culture-specific requirements for aligning relations between people and objects. Thus, emotional utterances may be constituents of socially functional emotions rather than separate commentaries on them. Full understanding of cultural variation requires investigation of naturalistic emotional conversations in different societies. (shrink)

Drawing on research reviewed in this special section, the present article discusses how various contextual factors impact on production and decoding of emotion-related facial activity. Although emotion-related variables often contribute to activation of prototypical “emotion expressions” and perceivers can often infer emotional meanings from these facial configurations, neither process is invariant or direct. Many facial movements are directed towards or away from events in the shared environment, and their effects depend on these relational orientations. Facial activity is not only a (...) medium for descriptive representation of internal affective states, but also a means of adjusting to, and operating on, external objects, and of influencing other people’s appraisals of those objects. (shrink)

This paper discusses contemporary advancements in the affective sciences that can inform the music-emotion literature. Key concepts in these theories are outlined, highlighting their points of agreement and disagreement. This summary shows the importance of appraisal within the emotion process, provides a greater emphasis upon goal-directed accounts of behavior, and a need to move away from discrete emotion “folk” concepts and toward the study of an emotional episode and its components. Consequently, three contemporary music emotion theories are examined through a (...) skeptical lens. This critique highlights the over-reliance upon categorization and a lack of acknowledgment of appraisal processes, specifically goal-directed appraisal, in examining how individual experiences of music emerge in different contexts. Based on this critique of current music-emotion models, we present our skeptically informed CODA model - Constructivistly-Organised Dimensional-Appraisal model. This model addresses skeptical limitations of existing theories, reinstates the role of goal-directed appraisal as central to what makes music relevant and meaningful to an individual in different contexts and brings together different theoretical frameworks into a single model. From the development of the CODA model, several hypotheses are proposed and applied to musical contexts. These hypotheses address theoretical issues such as acknowledging individual and contextual differences in emotional intensity and valence, as well as differentiating between induced and perceived emotions, and utilitarian and aesthetic emotions. We conclude with a sections of recommendations for future research. Altogether, this theoretical critique and proposed model points toward a positive future direction for music-emotion science. One where researchers can take forward testable predictions about what makes music relevant and meaningful to an individual. (shrink)

Starting with a review of research on love as an emotion, with an emphasis on romantic love, it is argued that despite strong emotional correlates evidence is lacking to conclude that love would meet the criteria of basic emotions. Theoretical developments are proposed where love is conceived of as a combination of an objectless drive, a desire for love, and a mythical and scripted representation that offers the possibility of labeling the current core affect. I argue that the basic motive (...) for love is not so much the partner’s personal attributes, but rather the benefits of the transformative power of being in love. (shrink)

Do basic emotions produce their predicted facial expressions in nonlaboratory settings? Available studies in naturalistic settings rarely test causation, but do show a surprisingly weak correlation between emotions and their predicted facial expressions. This evidence from field studies is more consistent with facial behavior having many causes, functions, and meanings, as opposed to their being fixed signals of basic emotion.

For more than a century expressions have been approached as bidimensional, static, instantaneous, self-contained, well-defined, and universal signals. These assumptions are starting to be empirically reconsidered: this special section of Emotion Review includes reviews on the physical, social, and cultural dynamics of expressions, and on the complex ways in which, throughout the lifespan, facial behavior and emotion are perceived and categorized by primates’ and humans’ brain. All these advances are certainly paving the way for new exciting approaches to facial behavior (...) more likely to strike an appropriate balance between description and explanation. (shrink)

That facial expressions are universal emotion signals has been supported by observers agreeing on the emotion mimed by actors. We show that actors can mime a diverse range of states: emotions, cognitions, physical states, and actions. English, Hindi, and Malayalam speakers viewed 25 video clips and indicated the state conveyed. Within each language, at least 23 of the 25 clips were recognised above chance and base rate. Facial expressions of emotions are not special in their recognisability, and it is miming (...) that may be the universal human ability. (shrink)

Basic Emotion theory has had a tremendous influence on the affective sciences, including music psychology, where most researchers have assumed that music expressivity is constrained to a limited set of basic emotions. Several scholars suggested that these constrains to musical expressivity are explained by the existence of a shared acoustic code to the expression of emotions in music and speech prosody. In this article we advocate for a shift from this focus on basic emotions to a constructionist account. This approach (...) proposes that the phenomenon of perception of emotions in music arises from the interaction of music’s ability to express core affects and the influence of top-down and contextual information in the listener’s mind. We start by reviewing the problems with the concept of Basic Emotions, and the inconsistent evidence that supports it. We also demonstrate how decades of developmental and cross-cultural research on music and emotional speech have failed to produce convincing findings to conclude that music expressivity is built upon a set of biologically pre-determined basic emotions. We then examine the cue-emotion consistencies between music and speech, and show how they support a parsimonious explanation, where musical expressivity is grounded on two dimensions of core affect (arousal and valence). Next, we explain how the fact that listeners reliably identify basic emotions in music does not arise from the existence of categorical boundaries in the stimuli, but from processes that facilitate categorical perception, such as using stereotyped stimuli and close-ended response formats, psychological processes of construction of mental prototypes, and contextual information. Finally, we outline our proposal of a constructionist account of perception of emotions in music, and spell out the ways in which this approach is able to make solve past conflicting findings. We conclude by providing explicit pointers about the methodological choices that will be vital to move beyond the popular Basic Emotion paradigm and start untangling the emergence of emotional experiences with music in the actual contexts in which they occur. -/- . (shrink)

We report two experimental studies of human perceptions of robotic facial expressions while systematically varying context effects and the cultural background of subjects. Except for Fear, East Asian and Western subjects were not significantly different in recognition rates, and, while Westerners were better at judging affect from mouth movement alone, East Asians were not any better at judging affect based on eye/brow movement alone. Moreover, context effects appeared capable of over-riding such cultural differences, most notably for Fear. The results seem (...) to run counter to previous theories of cultural differences in facial expression based on emoticons and eye fixation patterns. We connect this to broader research in cognitive science – suggesting the findings support a dynamical systems view of social cognition as an emergent phenomenon. The results here suggest that, if we can induce appropriate context effects, it may be possible to createculture-neutral modelsof robots and affective interaction. (shrink)

We report two experimental studies of human perceptions of robotic facial expressions while systematically varying context effects and the cultural background of subjects. Except for Fear, East Asian and Western subjects were not significantly different in recognition rates, and, while Westerners were better at judging affect from mouth movement alone, East Asians were not any better at judging affect based on eye/brow movement alone. Moreover, context effects appeared capable of over-riding such cultural differences, most notably for Fear. The results seem (...) to run counter to previous theories of cultural differences in facial expression based on emoticons and eye fixation patterns. We connect this to broader research in cognitive science – suggesting the findings support a dynamical systems view of social cognition as an emergent phenomenon. The results here suggest that, if we can induce appropriate context effects, it may be possible to createculture-neutral modelsof robots and affective interaction. (shrink)

We report two experimental studies of human perceptions of robotic facial expressions while systematically varying context effects and the cultural background of subjects. Except for Fear, East Asian and Western subjects were not significantly different in recognition rates, and, while Westerners were better at judging affect from mouth movement alone, East Asians were not any better at judging affect based on eye/brow movement alone. Moreover, context effects appeared capable of over-riding such cultural differences, most notably for Fear. The results seem (...) to run counter to previous theories of cultural differences in facial expression based on emoticons and eye fixation patterns. We connect this to broader research in cognitive science – suggesting the findings support a dynamical systems view of social cognition as an emergent phenomenon. The results here suggest that, if we can induce appropriate context effects, it may be possible to create culture-neutral models of robots and affective interaction. (shrink)

Evolutionary approaches to the emotions have traditionally focused on a subset of emotions that are shared with other species, characterized by distinct signals, and designed to solve a few key adaptive problems. By contrast, an evolutionary psychological approach broadens the range of adaptive problems emotions have evolved to solve, includes emotions that lack distinctive signals and are unique to humans, and synthesizes an evolutionary approach with an information-processing perspective. On this view, emotions are superordinate mechanisms that evolved to coordinate the (...) activity of other programs in the solution of adaptive problems. We illustrate the heuristic value of this approach by furnishing novel hypotheses for disgust and sexual arousal and highlighting unexplored areas of research. (shrink)

We make character trait attributions to predict and explain others’ behaviour. How should we understand character trait attribution in context across the domains of philosophy, folk psychology, developmental psychology, and evolutionary psychology? For example, how does trait attribution relate to our ability to attribute mental states to others, to ‘mindread’? This thesis uses philosophical methods and empirical data to argue for character trait attribution as a practice dependent upon our ability to mindread, which develops as a product of natural selection (...) acting on culture instead of genes. This analysis carves out trait attribution’s distinct place within an emerging complex and mature scholarship on pluralistic social cognition. (shrink)

I outline an account of perceptual knowledge and assess the extent to which it can be employed in a defence of perceptual accounts of emotion and value recognition. I argue that considerations ruling out lucky knowledge give us some reason to doubt its prospects in the case of value recognition. I also discuss recent empirical work on cultural and contextual influences on emotional expression, arguing that a perceptual account of value recognition is consistent with current evidence.

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)