Abstract

Comment on an article by . A semiotic perspective based on the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce is offered to open up new directions to the current debate over basic emotions. While explaining in a systematic way contested questions such as causal chain, association, and dissociation among the components of emotion, this semiotic analysis suggests that preoccupation with these building blocks type of questions masks and distracts attention from the more global problems that plague affective science—the essentialism that drives the debate, and the tendency to explain behavior in terms of isolated organisms. 2012 APA, all rights reserved)