Each person should have their pride – a proper sense of their worth and dignity. Improper pride is arrogance; proper pride, one might say, is necessary for self‐respect. As an emotion, pride may take the form of a momentary emotional occurrence, as when, for example, one is complimented by people whose approval one appreciates on some achievement of one's own, of one's spouse, or of one's children. Pride may also take the form of a persistent, enduring, emotion, (...) as when one feels proud of one's beauty and figure, or of the good looks of one's spouse or children; of one's achievements; of some admirable possession one owns; of one's dog or horse; and of one's high rank and office. Christian theologians have taken certain forms of pride to be contraries, the former a deadly vice and the latter a virtue. Hume too took pride and humility to be contraries. (shrink)

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, 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. (shrink)

Can you think of a meme that made you laugh or a political post that made you angry? These examples illustrate how social media use (SMU) impacts how people feel. Similarly, how people feel when they initiate SMU may impact the emotional effects of SMU. Someone feeling happy may feel more positively during SMU, whereas someone feeling sad may feel more negatively. Using an experimental design, we examined whether following SMU, those in a happy mood would experience increases in (...) positive affect (PA) and those in a sad mood would experience increases in negative affect (NA). A large sample of college students (N = 703) were randomly assigned to a happy, sad, or neutral mood induction before SMU. PA and NA were assessed at baseline, post-mood induction, and after SMU. Contrary to hypotheses, after SMU, people in happy moods experienced decreases in PA, and those in sad moods experienced decreases in NA, reflecting SMU having a dampening effect on emotions. PA and NA were significantly lower after SMU compared to baseline and did not vary by condition. How young adults feel when they log onto SMU matters in understanding how SMU impacts PA and NA, but on average, emotional experiences are dampened. (shrink)

Studies suggested that emotion dysregulation and identity processes are involved in social media (SM) misuse, even if their proximal role has not been investigated. Previous studies rarely discriminated between specific activities or between types of SM. We recruited 50 young adults and implemented a momentary ecological assessment measurement. Four times by day, during seven days, we measured SM use, frequency of several activities on SM, emotion dysregulation, distress and clarity of self-concept. Daily time spent on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok (...) were retrieved from devices. Intradaily changes in emotion dysregulation and clarity of self-concept predict changes in SM addiction symptoms and frequency of use according to the type of activity. Daily changes in time spent on SM were not predicted by emotion dysregulation, distress and self-concept clarity. Findings suggest that emotion dysregulation and poor self-concept clarity are proximal risk factors for SM misuse. (shrink)

ABSTRACTRumination and worry are two perseverative, negatively valenced thought processes that characterise depressive and anxiety disorders. Despite significant research interest, little is known about the everyday precipitants and consequences of rumination and worry. Using an experience sampling methodology, we examined and compared rumination and worry with respect to their relations to daily events and affective experience. Participants diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, co-occurring MDD–GAD, or no diagnosis carried an electronic device for one week and reported on rumination, (...) worry, significant events, positive affect, and negative affect. Across the clinical groups, occurrences of everyday events predicted subsequent increases in rumination, but not worry. Further, higher momentary levels of rumination, but not worry, predicted subsequent decreases in PA and increases in NA. Thus, in these clinical groups, rumination was more susceptible to... (shrink)

There is growing evidence that some individuals engage in both self-harm and aggression during the course of their lifetime. The co-occurrence of self-harm and aggression is termed dual-harm. Individuals who engage in dual-harm may represent a high-risk group with unique characteristics and pattern of harmful behaviours. Nevertheless, there is an absence of clinical guidelines for the treatment and prevention of dual-harm and a lack of agreed theoretical framework that accounts for why people may engage in this behaviour. The present (...) work aimed to address this gap in the literature by providing a narrative review of previous research of self-harm, aggression and dual-harm, and through doing so, presenting an evidence-based theory of dual-harm – the cognitive-emotional model of dual-harm. This model draws from previous studies and theories, including the General Aggression Model, diathesis-stress models and emotional dysregulation theories. The cognitive-emotional model highlights the potential distal, proximal and feedback processes of dual-harm, the role of personality style and the possible emotional regulation and interpersonal functions of this behaviour. In line with our theory, various clinical and research implications for dual-harm are suggested, including hypotheses to be tested by future studies. (shrink)

Jesse Prinz (2004) argues that emotional feelings (“state emotions”) can by themselves perceptually represent significant organism-environment relations. I object to this view mainly on the grounds that (1) it does not rule out the at least equally plausible view that emotional feelings are non-representational sensory registrations rather than perceptions, as Tyler Burge (2010) draws the distinction, and (2) perception of a relation requires perception of at least one of the relation’s relata, but an emotional feeling by itself (...) perceives neither the subject’s environment, nor in many cases the relevant subject itself. I then explore two ways in which emotional feelings as non-perceptual sensory registrations might still contribute to significant relation representation when associated with representations of the subject and/or its environment. After briefly discussing some difficulties presented by a multimodal, sensory-perceptual view of such representation, I argue in favor of a “cognitive recognition theory” that holds that significant relation instances are represented during emotion occurrences via applications of emotion-type concepts to "incoming" emotional feelings and their associated mental states. (shrink)

We commonly appeal to emotions to explain human behaviour: we seek comfort out of grief, we threaten someone in anger and we hide in fear. According to the standard Humean analysis, intentional action is always explained with reference to a belief-desire pair. According to recent consensus, however, emotions have independent motivating force apart from beliefs and desires, and supplant them when explaining emotional action. In this paper I provide a systematic framework for thinking about the motivational structure of emotion (...) and show how it is consistent with the Humean analysis. On this picture, emotions are not reducible to beliefs and desires, instead their primary motivational force comes from their role as modulators of desires—they control the strength of our occurrent desires. Emotions therefore motivate actions through the belief-desire system instead of overriding it. (shrink)

We explore the implications of a hierarchical structure, consisting of the higher order dimensions of nonspecific Positive Activation and Negative Activation and multiple specific negative affects and positive affects at the lower level. Emotional blends of the same valence are an essential part of this structure and form the basis of the higher order Negative and Positive Activation dimensions. Mixed cross-valence emotions are not central to this hierarchical scheme but are compatible with it. We examine the frequency of pure (...) emotional states, same-valence emotional blends, and cross-valence mixed emotions in a large momentary mood sample. (shrink)

As the ubiquity of technology-mediated communication grows, so does the number of questions about the costs and benefits of replacing in-person interactions with technology-mediated ones. In the present study, we used a daily diary design to examine how people’s emotional experiences vary across in-person, video-, phone-, and text-mediated interactions in day-to-day life. We hypothesised that individuals would report less positive affect and more negative affect after less life-like interactions (where in-person is defined as the most life-like and text-mediated as (...) the least life-like). In line with this hypothesis, the analysis of 527 unique interactions reported by 102 individuals (mean age = 19.3; 85.6% female) over the course of 7 days reveals that people feel lonelier, sadder, less affectionate, less supported, and less happy following less life-like interactions. Additional analyses show that the links between life-like communication and momentary experiences are independent of properties of individual interactions such as interaction length and participants’ overall evaluations of interaction quality. These findings provide initial evidence that there may be inherent properties of common technology-mediated communication tools that may lead to momentary changes in affective experiences and make social connection more challenging. (shrink)

DO WE CHOOSE OUR EMOTIONS? Can we be held responsible for our anger? for feeling jealousy? for falling in love or succumbing to resentment or hatred? The suggestion sounds odd because emotions are typically considered occurrences that happen to us: emotions are taken to be the hallmark of the irrational and the disruptive. Controlling one’s emotion is supposed to be like the caging and taming of a wild beast, the suppression and sublimation of a Freudian "it.".

A common distinction in emotion theory is between ‘occurrent emotions’ and ‘dispositional emotions’, ‘emotional episodes’ and ‘emotional states’, ‘emotions’ and ‘sentiments’, or more neutrally between ‘short-term emotions’ and ‘long-term emotions’. While short-term emotions are, or necessarily comprise, experiences, long-term emotions are generally seen as states that can exist without experience. Given the theoretical importance of experience for emotion theorists, long-term emotions are often cast aside as of secondary importance, or at any rate as in need of separate treatment. (...) In this paper, I cast doubt on the distinction. I argue that the considerations that support a view of long-term emotions as non-experiential states equally support a view of short-term emotions as non-experiential states, and so long-term and short-term emotions are ultimately the same sort of thing. If I am right, the dominant experience-centered accounts of emotions are at best accounts, not of emotions per se, but of some closely related phenomenon. (shrink)

Background: Altering components of ecological momentary assessment measures to better suit the purposes of individual studies is a common and oftentimes necessary step. Though the inherent flexibility in EMA has its benefits, no resource exists to provide an overview of the variability in how convergent constructs and symptoms have been assessed in the past. The present study fills that gap by examining EMA measurement design for mood and anxiety symptomatology.Methods: Various search engines were used to identify 234 relevant studies. (...) Items administered, data collection schedules, response scales, data collection platforms, and psychometric properties were extracted.Results: Study designs varied greatly in all aspects across the identified papers. Over 4,600 extracted items were qualitatively analyzed, resulting in the identification of 12 themes. The most EMA items focused on affect, with categories such as “happiness” and “tension” appearing most frequently. We provide all of our data extraction in the format of an open-source database.Limitations: Despite our best attempts to include as much of the relevant literature as possible, this review and the accompanying database are not exhaustive, but can easily be built upon to include other, newer studies.Conclusions: The fact that the affect theme featured both positive and negative emotional constructs highlights the dichotomous focus on valence and affect within the literature surrounding anxious and depressive symptomatology. We hope that our database will act as a helpful design decision-making resource for researchers studying this kind of symptomatology in the future.Systematic Review Registration: PROSPERO. (shrink)

Emotions are viewed as having evolved through their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life-tasks. Each emotion has unique features: signal, physiology, and antecedent events. Each emotion also has characteristics in common with other emotions: rapid onset, short duration, unbidden occurrence, automatic appraisal, and coherence among responses. These shared and unique characteristics are the product of our evolution, and distinguish emotions from other affective phenomena.

Self-criticism is a trait associated with increased psychopathology, but self-criticism is also a personality state reflecting an action that people do in moments of time. In the current study, we explored factors associated with heightened self-criticism in daily life. Participants (N = 197) received five random prompts per day for one week on their mobile phones, where they reported their current affect (negative and positive affect), willpower self-efficacy, distress intolerance, degree of support and criticism from others, current context (location, activity, (...) hunger, tiredness) and momentary self-criticism. We first demonstrated that self-criticism varies over time and across contexts, and is associated with heightened trait self-criticism. Then, using multilevel modelling, we explored the contextual factors associated with greater self-criticism. We found that self-criticism was higher when people were at home, and more tired. We also found higher self-criticism to be associated with greater negative and lower positive affect, greater distress intolerance, lower willpower and greater perceived criticism from others. In addition, self-criticism predicted subsequent distress intolerance, willpower and positive affect in lagged analyses. This study provides evidence that both environmental and psychological factors are associated with the dynamics of self-critical thoughts. (shrink)

Emotional stimuli (e.g. words, images) are often remembered better than neutral stimuli. However, little is known about how memory is affected by an environmentally induced emotional state (without any overtly emotional occurrences) – the focus of this study. Participants were randomly assigned to discovery (n = 305) and replication (n = 306) subsamples and viewed a desktop virtual environment before rating their emotions and completing objective (i.e. item, temporal-order, duration) and subjective (e.g. vividness, sensory detail, coherence) memory (...) measures. In both samples, a Partial Least Squares Correlation analysis showed that an emotional state characterised by high negative emotion (i.e. threat, fear, anxiety) and arousal was reliably associated with better memory in both objective (i.e. item) and subjective (i.e. vividness and sensory detail) domains. No reliable associations were observed for any temporal memory measures (objective or subjective). Thus, an environmentally induced state of negative emotion corresponds with enhanced memory for indices of episodic memory pertaining to “what” happened, but not necessarily “when” it happened. (shrink)

This paper addresses the so-called paradox of fiction, the problem of explaining how we can have emotional responses towards fiction. I claim that no account has yet provided an adequate explanation of how we can respond with genuine emotions when we know that the objects of our responses are fictional. I argue that we should understand the role played by the imagination in our engagement with fiction as functionally equivalent to that which it plays under the guise of acceptance (...) in practical reasoning, suggesting that the same underlying cognitive-affective mechanisms are involved in both activities. As such, our imaginative engagement with fiction un-problematically arouses emotions, but only to the extent that we are not occurrently attending to our epistemic relation to the fiction i.e. fully attending to the fact that the object of our response is merely fictional. In order to illuminate this idea I examine a recent proposal that the phenomenology of attention is partially non-attributive, and I argue that emotional phenomenology too shares this characteristic. (shrink)

We have investigated the emotional profile of dreams and the relationship between dream emotion and cognition using a form that specifically asked subjects to identify emotions within their dreams. Two hundred dream reports were collected from 20 subjects, each of whom produced 10 reports. Compared to previous studies, our method yielded a 10-fold increase in the amount of emotion reported. Anxiety/fear was reported most frequently, followed, in order, by joy/elation, anger, sadness, shame/guilt, and, least frequently, affection/eroticism. Unexpectedly, there was (...) no significant difference in the profiles of emotion reported by men and women. When the reports were scored for bizarreness, a significant correlation was found between the occurrence of bizarreness and major shifts in emotion. These results support the conclusion that dreaming is a mental state whose general emotional features are widely shared across individuals and strongly linked to cognitive features within individual dreams. (shrink)

Negative emotion differentiation has been suggested to be important for adaptive emotion regulation. However, knowledge concerning how ED may impact specific ER strategy choice remains surprisingly sparse. We therefore investigated if person-level negative ED was associated with habitual use of individual ER strategies, how person-level negative ED was associated with daily use of individual ER strategies, and finally how within-person daily fluctuations in negative ED were associated with daily use of individual ER strategies. During a 10-day experience sampling study, 90 (...) healthy participants rated their momentary emotions and their ER efforts in response to those emotions. ER strategies included four putatively adaptive strategies and four putatively maladaptive strategies. Results revealed that negative ED at the person level was neither associated with habitual nor daily ER strategy endorsement when controlling for negative emotions. Likewise, associations between within-individual daily variation in negative ED and daily ER did not remain statistically significant after controlling for negative emotions. The results thus point to no or weak associations between negative ED and ER choice above and beyond negative emotions. Future experimental studies addressing ED at the momentary level and teasing out the ED–ER causal timeline are needed to further evaluate ED–ER associations. Findings from such research may represent an important step toward refining psychotherapeutic interventions aimed at improving emotional problems. (shrink)

In this article, I provide an analysis of the widespread, intellectually fascinating, and existentially challenging phenomenon of self-reflexive anxiety in which we feel threatened by what or who we are. I focus on those cases in which we take an event or action whose possible occurrence we attribute to ourselves to be expressive or constitutive of our identity. As I argue, depending on the kind of event we are dealing with, our descriptive self-conception, our self-esteem, or our evaluative self-conception (...) are at stake. In all cases, we are confronted with a dialectic between self and other, activity and passivity inherent in our personhood or even in our agency. I demonstrate how my analysis is not only of intrinsic value, but it can also help us in achieving a better understanding of self-reflexive emotions in general and ‘traditional’ self-reflexive emotions like shame in particular. (shrink)

On the surface, stoicism and emotion seem like contradictory terms. Yet the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome were deeply interested in the emotions, which they understood as complex judgments about what we regard as valuable in our surroundings. Stoicism and Emotion shows that they did not simply advocate an across-the-board suppression of feeling, as stoicism implies in today’s English, but instead conducted a searching examination of these powerful psychological responses, seeking to understand what attitude toward them expresses the (...) deepest respect for human potential. In this elegant and clearly written work, Margaret Graver gives a compelling new interpretation of the Stoic position. Drawing on a vast range of ancient sources, she argues that the chief demand of Stoic ethics is not that we should suppress or deny our feelings, but that we should perfect the rational mind at the core of every human being. Like all our judgments, the Stoics believed, our affective responses can be either true or false and right or wrong, and we must assume responsibility for them. Without glossing over the difficulties, Graver also shows how the Stoics dealt with those questions that seem to present problems for their theory: the physiological basis of affective responses, the phenomenon of being carried away by one’s emotions, the occurrence of involuntary feelings and the disordered behaviors of mental illness. Ultimately revealing the deeper motivations of Stoic philosophy, Stoicism and Emotion uncovers the sources of its broad appeal in the ancient world and illuminates its surprising relevance to our own. (shrink)

The present study provides evidence that valence focus and arousal focus are important processes in determining whether a dimensional or a discrete emotion model best captures how people label their affective states. Individuals high in valence focus and low in arousal focus fit a dimensional model better in that they reported more co-occurrences among like-valenced affective states, whereas those lower in valence focus and higher in arousal focus fit a discrete model better in that they reported fewer co-occurrences between like-valenced (...) affective states. Taken together, these findings suggest that one static, nomothetic theory may not accurately describe the subjective affective experience of all individuals. (shrink)

The paper argues that while the Serbian society and political elite are known for treating their country’s accession to the EU in terms of pragmatic utility maximisation, they generally conceive of Serbian relations with Russia, contrariwise, as an identity-laden issue. To prove it, the author analyses Serbia’s behaviour toward Russia along the features of emotion-driven cooperation, found in the literature on identity and emotions in foreign policy. In particular, the paper focuses on Serbians’ especially strong friendliness vis-à-vis Russia, the parallel (...) existence of the Other (the West) in their identity and the particularly strong intensity of their attraction to Russia during Serbia-West conflicts, the reinforcement of their affection to Russia by national traumas, the endurance of the affection’s strength despite conflicting rational interests and negative experiences in bilateral interaction, the frequent occurrence of references to Russia in Serbia’s domestic discourse and decisional justifications and a large use of historical analogies concerning Russia. Finally, the author ponders over the implications of the existent configuration of emotional and pragmatic forces in Serbian politics for the country’s current and future conduct toward Russia and the EU. (shrink)

Emotion evaluations are assumed to play a crucial role in the emotion regulation process. We tested a postulate from our framework of emotion dysregulation (Nowak, U., Wittkamp, M. F., Clamor, A., & Lincoln, T. M. [2021]. Using the Ball-in-Bowl metaphor to outline an integrative framework for understanding dysregulated emotion. Frontiers in Psychiatry, 12, 118), namely that the extent to which individuals evaluate an emotion as harmful and their personal resources to modify and accept/tolerate the emotion as sufficient predict the subsequent (...) use of regulation strategies. Participants (n = 118) from a community sample took part in an experience-sampling assessment over 7 days including 10 daily paired measurements. The first measured momentary affective valence and arousal along with harmfulness evaluations and evaluations of personal resources to modify and accept/tolerate an emotion. The second followed three minutes later and measured emotion regulation strategies. The more harmful individuals evaluated an emotion, the more likely they were to use an emotion regulation strategy. The more harmful individuals evaluated an emotion, and the less sufficient they evaluated their personal resources to accept/tolerate an emotion, the more likely they were to use a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy. We conclude that emotions that people evaluate as harmful or difficult to accept are most likely to be regulated in a maladaptive manner. This implies that modifying beliefs about emotions could represent a promising treatment approach. (shrink)

The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only. This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001) as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this (...) move, it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as LICENSING but as RESCUING by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs. (shrink)

The present study provides evidence that valence focus and arousal focus are important processes in determining whether a dimensional or a discrete emotion model best captures how people label their affective states. Individuals high in valence focus and low in arousal focus fit a dimensional model better in that they reported more co-occurrences among like-valenced affective states, whereas those lower in valence focus and higher in arousal focus fit a discrete model better in that they reported fewer co-occurrences between like-valenced (...) affective states. Taken together, these findings suggest that one static, nomothetic theory may not accurately describe the subjective affective experience of all individuals. (shrink)

This research provides an exploratory investigation of whether gift/help-receiving contexts that elicit mixed emotional variants of gratitude can be distinguished from typical gratitude-eliciting situations in their associated appraisals, action tendencies, and psychosocial effects. We examined 473 participants (159 males, 312 females, 2 others; Mage = 31.07) using a one-way four-conditions between-subjects experiment. Participants were randomly assigned to complete recall tasks describing four different gratitude-eliciting situations. Emotions, cognitive appraisals, action tendencies, and general psychosocial outcomes were assessed. Relative to a control (...) condition involving receiving a gift or help (gift/help condition), receiving something at the expense of a benefactor (benefactor-inconvenience condition) elicited gratitude-guilt; receiving something with an expectation of return (return-favour condition) elicited gratitude-disappointment and gratitude-anger; while receiving a disliked gift or receiving assistance that made things worse (backfire condition) primarily elicited gratitude-disappointment while also eliciting gratitude-anger and gratitude-guilt. Each condition was differentiable from control in their appraisals, action tendencies, and psychosocial effects. Notably, contexts which elicited mixed emotional variants of gratitude were characterised by the co-occurrence of conflicting appraisals such as pleasantness and unpleasantness or goal-congruence and goal-incongruence. Additionally, the return-favour and backfire conditions were most dissimilar from control, and were associated with the most negative action tendencies and psychosocial outcomes. (shrink)

A widespread perspective describes emotions as distinct categories bridged by fuzzy boundaries, indicating that emotions are distinct and dimensional at the same time. Theoretical and methodological approaches to this perspective still need further development. We conceptualize emotions as overlapping networks of causal relationships between emotion components—networks representing distinct emotions share components with and relate to each other. To investigate this conceptualization, we introduce network analysis to emotion research and apply it to the reanalysis of a data set on multiple positive (...) emotions. Specifically, we describe the estimation of networks from data, and the detection of overlapping communities of nodes in these networks. The network perspective has implications for the understanding of distinct emotions, their co-occurrence, and their measurement. (shrink)

Conveying emotions in spoken poetry may be based on a poem’s semantic content and/or on emotional prosody, i.e. on acoustic features above single speech sounds. However, hypotheses of more direct sound–emotion relations in poetry, such as those based on the frequency of occurrence of certain phonemes, have not withstood empirical (re)testing. Therefore, we investigated sound–emotion associations based on prosodic features as a potential alternative route for the, at least partially, non-semantic expression and perception of emotions in poetry. We (...) first conducted a pre-study designed to validate relevant parameters of joy- and sadness-supporting prosody in the recitation, i.e. acoustic production, of poetry. The parameters obtained thereof guided the experimental modification of recordings of German joyful and sad poems such that for each poem, three prosodic variants were constructed: one with a joy-supporting prosody, one with a sadness-supporting prosody, and a neutral variant. In the subsequent experiment, native German speakers and participants with no command of German rated the joyfulness and sadness of these three variants. This design allowed us to investigate the role of emotional prosody, operationalized in terms of sound-emotion parameters, both in combination with and dissociated from semantic access to the emotional content of the poems. The findings from our pre-study showed that the emotional content of poems (based on pre-classifications into joyful and sad) indeed predicted the prosodic features pitch and articulation rate. The subsequent perception experiment revealed that cues provided by joyful and sad prosody specifically affect non-German-speaking listeners’ emotion ratings of the poems. Thus, the present investigation lends support to the hypothesis of prosody-based iconic relations between perceived emotion and sound qualia. At the same time, our findings also highlight that semantic access substantially decreases the role of cross-language sound–emotion associations and indicate that non-German-speaking participants may also use phonetic and prosodic cues other than the ones that were targeted and manipulated here. (shrink)

Affective information can be retrieved simply by measuring words co‐occurrences in linguistic contexts. Lenci and colleagues demonstrate that the affective measures retrieved from linguistic occurrences predict words’ concreteness: abstract words are more heavily loaded with affective information than concrete ones. These results challenge the Affective grounding hypothesis, suggesting that abstract concepts may be ungrounded and coded only linguistically, and that their affective load may be a linguistic factor.

Mixed emotions are conceptualized as involving the co-occurrence of states opposite in valence. One might expect that combinations of opposites would show diminished overall emotion intensity. But is this always the case? If not, when will mixed emotions be characterized by high intensity, and when by low intensity? In this article, theories of emotion-eliciting appraisal and emotion intensity are employed to understand mixed emotions and phenomena of passion. It is proposed that intense emotions are produced by transformative events: perceived (...) motive-relevant changes that are important, large, and rapid. Transformative events that can move a person between greatly motive-inconsistent and greatly motive-consistent outcomes constitute one potent path to passion. Illustrative phenomena of passion, mixed emotions, and related research are discussed. (shrink)

This article clarifies the nature of meta-emotions, and it surveys the prospects of applying a version of the perceptualist model of emotions to them. It first considers central aspects of their intentionality and phenomenal character. It then applies the perceptualist model to meta-emotions, addressing issues of evaluative content and the normative dimension of meta-emotional experience. Finally, in considering challenges and objections, it assesses the perceptualist model, concluding that its application to meta-emotions is an attractive extension of the theory, insofar (...) as it captures some distinctive features of meta-emotions—specifically their normative dimension—while locating them within the domain of occurrent affective experiences. (shrink)

I want to attempt to analyze a forgotten area in the philosophy of emotions, the relations between physiological changes and the emotions. I want to do this: by first of all briefly setting out some distinctions necessary to the understanding of the position I will be arguing for, then by trying to elucidate what exactly is to be understood by the term ‘physiological change’ in the context of an emotion, by showing that particular physiological changes are not part of the (...) concept of any particular emotion and are only linked causally to the cognitive-appetitive part of an occurrent emotional state, by showing, however, that the notion of a physiological change is part of the concept of an emotional state, and, finally, by drawing out some consequences of this analysis. (shrink)

In this paper, I shall discuss the relation between practical reason and emotions in Kant. First, I begin by explaining why knowledge of emotions is important for the transcendental project in the moral domain, understood as the claim that reason can determine our actions, in spite of our inclinations. Second, I explain the definition of affects and passions in Kant's philosophy and relate the two to feelings and the faculty of desire. I then question the possibility of controlling emotions, showing (...) that it is, if not an altogether impossible task, at least a difficult one. I show that while affects present a momentary loss of control, they can still coexist with practical reason. Passions, however, may ground principles for actions, and represent a serious danger for rational mastery over inclinations. (shrink)

(written in 2017) According to Dorothea Debus (2007), all emotional aspects related to an act of remembering are present and new emotional responses to the remembered past event. This is a common conception of the nature of the emotional aspect of personal memories, if not explicitly defended then at least implicitly accepted in the literature. In this article, I first criticize Debus’ arguments and demonstrate that she does not give us valid reasons to believe that all the (...) emotional aspects related to a memory are present and new emotional responses to that past event. I then criticize Debus’ thesis tout court for being a direct consequence of assuming a particular conceptualization of the nature of emotions: emotions as physiological changes. Finally, based on a different conceptualization of emotions that focuses on their relational nature, I propose an alternative framework for analyzing the different possible emotional aspects of our personal memories. This leads me to conclude, contrary to Debus, that some emotional aspects of our memories are not occurrent emotions but are better conceived as quasi-emotions. (shrink)

This perspective paper aims at discussing theoretical principles that could explain how emotion regulation and physical diseases mutually influence each other in the context of borderline personality disorder (BPD). Furthermore, this paper discusses the clinical implications of the functional relationships between emotion regulation, BPD and medical conditions considering dialectical behavior therapy (DBT) as a well-validated therapeutic intervention, which encompasses these issues. The inflexible use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies (e.g., suppression, experiential avoidance, and rumination) might directly increase the probability of (...) developing physical diseases through a physiological pathway, or indirectly through a behavioral pathway. Some metabolic and chronic medical conditions could significantly impact emotional functioning through biological alterations involved in emotion regulation. Several empirical studies have shown high co-occurrence rates between BPD and several chronic physical diseases, especially ones linked to emotion-based maladaptive behaviors. DBT addresses physical diseases reported by individuals with BPD reducing problematic behaviors functionally associated to emotion dysregulation and identifying physical health as a goal forBuilding a Life Worth Living. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:On Emotions That Last LongerArgyris Stringaris (bio)Keywordsemotion, mood, Aristotle, longitudinal studies, SchelerDistinguishing between emotions and cognitions does not seem entirely straightforward. Both are said to involve some form of computational activity and both to require a decision-making process. For example, according to Lazarus’ appraisal theory of emotions, “the person must decide whether what is going on is relevant to important values or goals” (Lazarus 1991, 30). Conversely, feelings seem (...) to be easier to separate from other experiences and, accordingly, those having a feeling are usually in position to contrast them with, say, what they would describe as their thoughts. Moreover, people would claim without much hesitation that they are able to distinguish between feelings: some are “good” and some are “bad,” whereas others are “deep” and others still “shallow.” The reliability of feelings—as judged by, for example, how we currently feel about something that seemed to be a good feeling some time ago—is certainly imperfect, but this does not necessarily negate their value.Rosfort and Stanghellini (2009) raise several important and complex issues about emotions and provide us with several good reasons to think more about feelings. They argue that, if, as some proponents of the cognitive theory of emotions claim, we can have emotions and not even know about them, then, at least, whenever we have feelings we are in position to know that we have emotions. For the authors, this is one of the main reasons why feelings are so crucial in “uncovering a person's situatedness in the world.” Feelings “reveal the diverse phenomenal structure” of emotions and, thus, according to the authors there is a need to distinguish between fundamental states such as moods and affects. The distinction is one classically made in continental psychopathology and the authors draw on interesting, and little known, aspects of the phenomenological tradition in doing so. They base their distinction on three dimensions, namely intentionality, temporality, and narrativity—these they consider as three core aspects of personhood.The authors’ strategy is yielding and it seems worthwhile that their work be further pursued. A great number of very interesting questions arising from Rosfort and Stanghellini's article. For example, the authors state that moods and affects are “opposites” of each other. Although they seem distinguishable on the basis of what the authors say, there is no compelling reason to see them as opposites. To use one of their examples, the fact that anxiety is different from fear because it lasts longer and because it is more diffuse does not mean that the two are either polar opposites or orthogonal to each other. Perhaps more important, it could be argued that short and focused emotional states, such as fear, may be predicated upon the more enduring ones, in this case anxiety. Conversely, it could mean that the occurrence of a [End Page 277] shorter, more focused state, of an affect in the authors’ terminology, will trigger longer-lasting and diffuse states, that is, moods. Furthermore, how long is long enough for something to constitute an affect? According to the authors, sadness is an example of a mood, whereas grief is classified as an affect. But sadness may be short lived and be highly focused; grief, on the other hand, can persist for months. And what is grief if not an instance of sadness? The authors wisely concede some of these points in their paper.It seems that a more general question needs to be asked: how long may emotions last? Emotions are regarded by many as short-lived and transient phenomena. However, within each person there is probably a fair degree of consistency in some patterns of emotional reactions. Thus, not least according to common belief, it is the angry man who is prone to angry outbursts (in Aristotle, the swiftly moving to anger, εὐκίνητος πρὸς ỏργὴν is the angry man, ỏργίλος or ỏξύθυμος).). This view seems justified by some evidence. Consider, for example, the predictions of temperamental characteristics at age three from the Dunnedin study (Caspi 2000); those children found to be emotionally labile, restless, and impulsive are, compared with so-called inhibited children, about three times more likely to become adults with antisocial personality. Or consider how predictive... (shrink)

ABSTRACTAfter co-occurrence of a neutral conditioned stimulus with an affective unconditioned stimulus, the evaluation of the CS acquires the US valence. This effect disappears when infor...

In this paper, I shall discuss the relation between practical reason and emotions in Kant. First, I begin by explaining why knowledge of emotions is important for the transcendental project in the moral domain, understood as the claim that reason can determine our actions, in spite of our inclinations. Second, I explain the definition of affects and passions in Kant's philosophy and relate the two to feelings and the faculty of desire. I then question the possibility of controlling emotions, showing (...) that it is, if not an altogether impossible task, at least a difficult one. I show that while affects present a momentary loss of control, they can still coexist with practical reason. Passions, however, may ground principles for actions, and represent a serious danger for rational mastery over inclinations. (shrink)

Attachment theory proposes that the activation of the attachment system enacts emotion regulation (ER) to maintain security or cope with insecurity. However, the effects of ER on attachment states and their bidirectional influences remain poorly understood. In this ecological momentary assessment study, we examined the dynamics between attachment and ER. We hypothesised that attachment states and ER influence each other through time. Specifically, we hypothesised bidirectional short-term cycles between state attachment security and reappraisal, state attachment anxiety and rumination, and (...) state attachment avoidance and suppression. We also tested how trait attachment is related to state attachment and ER. One hundred twenty-two participants (Mage = 26.4) completed the Experiences in Close Relationship–Revised and reported state attachment and ER seven times daily for seven days. The results were only partly consistent with our cycle hypotheses yet revealed a cycle between low state attachment security and rumination that was attenuated by reappraisal. Moreover, rumination and suppression predicted increased insecure states, and reappraisal predicted increased secure and insecure states. Finally, trait attachment showed associations with state attachment and ER. Our study suggests regulatory dynamics between attachment and ER and opens important questions about their functional relationship in maintaining attachment-related behavioural patterns and emotional well-being. (shrink)

ABSTRACTOne prestudy based on a corpus analysis and four experiments in which participants had to invent novel names for persons or objects investigated how the valence of a face or an object affects the phonological characteristics of the respective novel name. Based on the articulatory feedback hypothesis, we predicted that /i:/ is included more frequently in fictional names for faces or objects with a positive valence than for those with a negative valence. For /o:/, the pattern should reverse. An analysis (...) of the Berlin Affective Word List – Reloaded yielded a higher number of occurrences of /o:/ in German words with negative valence than in words with positive valence; with /i:/ the situation is less clear. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants named persons showing a positive or a negative facial expression. Names for smiling persons included more /i:/s and fewer /o:/s than names for persons with a negative facial expression. In Experiments 3 and 4, participant... (shrink)

Rationality is the constitutive ideal of the mental. Therefore it is important to understand the sort of rationality at issue here. It is often assumed that rationality just is instrumental rationality, but this leaves us with too thin a notion of desire: Desires centrally involve the notion of things mattering or being significant, for their objects must normally be worth pursuing to the subject. Such significance is simply unintelligible in terms of instrumental rationality. Consequently, understanding significance and its rational connections (...) to desire and action is essential to understanding rationality as a constitutive ideal. In particular, it is a crucial step in vindicating the idea of animal thought. ;I argue that significance, as well as desire, must be understood in part in terms of the emotions. Many prominent theories of emotions illegitimately conceive of significance as conceptually prior to the capacity for having emotions, in that things can be significant to a creature that does not have any emotions at all. In contrast, I argue first that a creature must have the capacity for emotions in order to be a subject of significance because to be significant is in part to be a suitable object of emotions generally. Second, emotions are essentially feelings not because they "involve" bodily sensations but because they are a distinctive kind of awareness of the significance of the world to the subject; particular occurrent emotions therefore presuppose that things are already significant to the subject. Consequently, emotions and significance form a conceptual package, with neither being prior to the other: Significance and the emotions emerge together in a pattern of instrumental and non-instrumental rationality that can be articulated in terms of their interconnected explanatory roles. ;Being a subject of beliefs and desires therefore requires more than simply rationally mediated goal-directedness, as Dennett believes. Rather, it requires being open, through the emotions, to the significance of the world and to the reasons that significance provides for action. This conclusion is shown to have important ramifications for our understanding both of a minimal sense of agency and of what it is to be a person. (shrink)

Wayne A. Davis uses his theory of happiness to clarify and deepen Rand's theory of emotion. He distinguishes belief from knowledge, volitive from appetitive desire, and occurrent thinking from believing. He suggests that values in Rand's sense are things we volitively desire. Happiness is defined in terms of the sum of the products of the degree of belief and desire functions over all thoughts. Davis then evaluates such Randian maxims as that happiness cannot be achieved by the pursuit of irrational (...) whims, and that emotions are not tools of cognition, but products of one's premises—one's philosophy. (shrink)

The thesis defends the view that there are basic emotions---pancultural emotions that can be, but are not necessarily, propositional attitudes---and endorses a version of the affect program theory of emotions, augmented with a special stress upon the relation of emotions to motor capabilities and strategies. After developing a taxonomy of affects, I argue against the reduction of emotions to other mental states like belief, desire, or judgment. I then discuss how affects relate to belief. First, I consider the claims of (...) social constructionists about emotion, and argue that only a weakened version of this view is tenable. Second, I consider the issue of emoting for fictions, and argue this common occurrence is incompatible with a number of cognitivist theories of emotion. Both of these discussions suggest that a better theory of the relation of emotion to propositional contents is weak content cognitivism, the view that basic emotions can have propositional contents which need not be believed. In conclusion, I consider the relation between basic emotions and intentionality. I argue that basic emotions are object-directed, and that this kind of intentionality can be explained by way of considering basic emotions as actions. This allows me to describe how basic emotions relate to rationality, and offer a special consideration of the kind of ethical internalism that a naturalist theory of basic emotions supports. (shrink)

Contemporary emotion research typically takes the phenomenon of emotion to be exhausted by a class of mental events that are intentional, conscious, and related to certain sorts of behaviour. Moreover, other affective phenomena, such as moods, are also considered to be relatively short-term, episodic, or occurrent states of the subject undergoing them. Emotions, and other putative emotional phenomena that common-sense takes as long-lasting, non-episodic, or dispositional are things that both philosophers and scientists sometimes recognise, but that are relatively neglected (...) in comparison to emotional episodes. This thesis aims at showing that this neglect is unjustified. I will argue that there is a class of entities, 'sentiments'—broadly characterised as dispositions to undergo emotional episodes—that are irreducible to emotional episodes or collections thereof and have properties that make them a suitable target of study by the emotion researcher.In the first chapter, I argue that an analysis of caring as a pattern of emotional episodes, while more plausible than alternative, non-emotional accounts, faces a number of counterexamples that motivate the search for an account of caring as related in a certain way to emotions but as irreducible to them. I argue that a dispositional account, according to which dispositions are conceived as distinct from their manifestations, is an account for which a strong case can be made.The second chapter is dedicated to defending a modest form of realism about dispositions in general and psychological dispositions in particular. According to realism, dispositions are genuine properties that, although perhaps reducible to non-dispositional properties, cannot be re-described in terms of events only. In the third chapter, I show in what ways emotional dispositions can positively contribute to the explanation of the occurrence of emotional episodes. In the fourth chapter, I argue that caring, understood as a species of sentiment, is not to be construed as a mere disposition to produce certain events; rather, we should allow that certain dispositions are genuinely mental or psychological. Assuming realism about the mental, I argue that some dispositions are mental in a way that others are not. I suggest that being intentional is the property that makes psychological dispositions genuinely mental. I end the chapter by drawing a connection between caring and the notion of character. On my view, caring is at least a necessary ingredient of certain character traits, in particular the virtues. In chapter five, I tackle a recent form of empirically informed scepticism about character and argue, on the basis of general considerations about psychological dispositions, that the sceptic’s case is not as strong as she makes out. Finally, in chapter six, I argue that at least certain forms of sentiment, for example romantic love, can be genuinely supported by reasons, thereby suggesting a way they can contribute to the value of our lives. Overall, the aim of this thesis is to establish the respectability of sentiments in a sophisticated account of the mind. (shrink)