Advocates for the psychological construction of emotion view themselves as articulating a non-essentialist alternative to basic emotion theory's essentialist notion of affect programs. Psychological constructionists have also argued that holding essentialist assumptions about emotions engenders misconceptions about the psychological constructionist viewpoint. If so, it is important to understand what

This paper takes its cue from the recent interest in materiality and “things” in the field of Byzantine studies, to explore the role of objects in evoking being moved. First, it advances a new model to explain the relationship between being moved and affordances. Second, it focuses on a specific case study, that is Michael Psellos’ funeral oration for his daughter Styliane (1054), who died of smallpox

Efforts to identify in the expression “being moved” a new emotion have found a hospitable environment in the recent turn to the body in emotion and cognitive studies, exemplified herein affect theory, with a particular focus on the effects of music. Although classical Greek and Latin had comparable expressions, however, they did not single out a specific emotion. Given that music played an important

According to recent accounts, we experience the emotion of “being moved” when a situation brings into play our core values. What are the core values evoked by nonhuman landscapes, however, particularly as the distinction between man-made and natural environments becomes increasingly blurry in the so-called Anthropocene? That is the central question tackled by this article. I start by rethinking the

Links between musicality and vocal emotion perception skills have only recently emerged as a focus of study. Here we review current evidence for or against such links. Based on a systematic literature search, we identified 33 studies that addressed either (a) vocal emotion perception in musicians and nonmusicians, (b) vocal emotion perception in individuals with congenital amusia, (c) the role of individual

Many of the most popular and critically acclaimed horror films feature grief as a central theme. This article argues that horror films are especially suited to portraying and communicating the phenomenology of grief. We explore two overlapping claims. First, horror is well suited to represent the experience of grief, in particular because the disruptive effects of horror “monsters” on protagonists

Initial evaluation structures (IESs) currently proposed as the earliest detectors of affective stimuli (e.g., amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, or insula) are high-order structures (a) whose response latency cannot account for the first visual cortex emotion-related response (~80 ms), and (b) lack the necessary infrastructure to locally analyze the visual features that define emotional stimuli. Several

The sympathetic plot—featuring a goal-directed protagonist who confronts obstacles, overcomes them, and wins rewards—is ubiquitous. Here, I propose that it recurs because it entertains, engaging two sets of psychological mechanisms. First, it triggers mechanisms for learning about obstacles and how to overcome them. It builds interest by confronting a protagonist with a problem and induces satisfaction

There is widespread interest in the possibility that music training enhances nonmusical abilities. This possibility has been examined primarily for speech perception and domain-general abilities such as IQ. Although social and emotional processes are central to many musical activities, transfer from music training to socioemotional skills remains underexplored. Here we synthesize results from studies

This article introduces the somatic transform that operationalizes the relation between affect and cognition at the psychological level of analysis by capitalizing on the relation between the cognitive-denotative and affective-connotative meaning of concepts as measured with semantic differential rating scales. Following discussion of levels of analysis, the importance of language at the psychological

The study of emotional intelligence (EI) and its relationship with the dark triad has emerged as a popular research area. However, the complex nature of the dark triad and EI, including multiple measures for assessment, has led to inconsistent findings. A systematic review was conducted to focus on the multifaceted nature of the dark triad traits. Included studies must have been conducted with adult

Starting with this issue, I become the sole Editor-in-Chief of Emotion Review. For the past 3 years I have shared this position with Yulia Chentsova-Dutton. I would like to express my gratitude for all that she has contributed to this journal as well as for the pleasure of our collaboration. For the first 2 of those years, our collaboration was extensive and face-to-face—there was no global pandemic

Is disgust morally valuable? The answer to that question turns, in large part, on what we can do to shape disgust for the better. But this cultivation question has received surprisingly little attention in philosophical debates. To address this deficiency, this article examines empirical work on disgust and emotion regulation. This research reveals that while we can exert some control over how we experience

Emotions have traditionally been viewed as intrapersonal phenomena. Over the past decades, theory and research have shifted toward a more social perspective that emphasizes the role of emotional expressions in coordinating social interaction. I provide a brief history of this ongoing paradigm shift, which reveals two critical developments. The first concerns a continuing shift in emphasis on the social-communicative

The present contribution provides a constructive criticism of Brian Parkinson’s “Heart to Heart: A Relation-Alignment Approach to Emotion’s Social Effects.” I outline a number of points in Parkinson’s approach that I find particularly useful from a sociological perspective on emotions and provide suggestions for further extending his account. In doing so, I concentrate on issues regarding the social

How do facial movements and verbal statements relate to emotional processes? A familiar answer is that the primary phenomenon is an internally located emotion that may then get expressed on the face and represented in words. In this view, emotion’s social functions and effects are indirect consequences of prior intrapsychic states or events. By contrast, my target article argued that facial and verbal

Do people really fare better if they can rely on many social ties? Research suggests that benefits of interpersonal emotion regulation (ER) can be derived from both large and small social networks. Building on the intrapersonal regulatory flexibility model, we propose the emotion regulation repertoire of social support (ERROSS) model that views effective socioemotional support as the combination of

This article integrates arguments and evidence from my 2019 monograph Heart to Heart: How Your Emotions Affect Other People. The central claim is that emotions operate as processes of relation alignment that produce convergence, complementarity, or conflict between two or more people’s orientations to objects. In some cases, relation alignment involves strategic presentation of emotional information

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

I consider the five contributions in this special section as evidence that the research area dealing with the vocal expression of emotion is advancing rapidly, both in terms of the number of pertinent empirical studies and with respect to an ever increasing sophistication of methodology. I provide some suggestions on promising areas for future interdisciplinary research, including work on emotion expression

Neurocognitive models (e.g., Schirmer & Kotz, 2006) have helped to characterize how listeners incrementally derive meaning from vocal expressions of emotion in spoken language, what neural mechanisms are involved at different processing stages, and their relative time course. But how can these insights be applied to communicative situations in which prosody serves a predominantly interpersonal function

Some philosophers claim that emotions are, at best, hindrances to the discovery of evaluative truths, while others omit them entirely from their epistemology of value. I argue, however, that this is a mistake. Drawing an evaluative parallel with Frank Jackson’s Mary case, I show there is a distinctive way in which emotions epistemically enhance evaluative judgment. This is, in fact, a conclusion philosophers

It is clear a relational approach to the study of empathy is gaining traction across multiple disciplines. Both commentaries on “A Relational Framework for Integrating the Study of Empathy in Children and Adults” underscored the need to expand the relational framework of empathy to incorporate the broader social and cultural context in which children and adults live. In the present reply we outline

The process by which emotion concepts are learned is largely unexplored. Hoemann, Devlin, and Barrett (2020) and Shablack, Stein, and Lindquist (2020) argue that emotion concepts are learned through emotion labels (e.g., “happy”), which cohere variable aspects of emotions into abstract, conceptual categories. While such labeling-dependent learning mechanisms (supervised learning) are plausible, we

Mascolo (2020) successfully defends a relational, developmental approach to emotions. I draw parallels between his perspective and the enactive approach, in particular with the concept of participatory sense-making. I suggest that the need to understand emotions developmentally reveals a deeper link between affective life and human unfinishedness, namely, that emotions are collectively constituted

This comment considers some potential implications of both the appraisal approaches and the framework proposed by Mascolo in regard to a mechanism that is particularly important for development: learning. More specifically, I discuss Mascolo’s account of emotion with respect to how appraisal processes can be considered relational, automatic, social, as well as the drivers of learning amplification

The study of young children’s prosocial emotions, especially as they regulate children’s social interactions toward cooperative ends, is burgeoning. We join Algoe (2020) and Tsang (2020) in their assessment that early ontogeny provides a unique window into the study of prosocial emotions, and that the behavioural methods developed to study prosocial emotions in young children could productively be

It is an honor to be able to engage Ezequiel Di Paolo’s and David Sander’s reflections on relational conceptions of emotional development. In this reply, I elaborate on the role of emotion in the open-ended construction of self. Di Paolo suggests that emotions are “collectively constituted ways of regulating human becoming” (2020, p. 229); Sander (2020) maintains that as felt modes of engagement, emotions

A full understanding of emotion necessitates the bridging of disciplinary perspectives and methodological approaches. This special section uses emotional development as a foil to illustrate how such a bridge may be constructed and how studying emotional development can benefit the field as a whole. In doing so, this collection of articles points to three key principles for the study of emotion, specifically

We conducted an integrative data analysis to examine the hedonic character of nostalgia. We combined positive and negative affect measures from 41 experiments manipulating nostalgia (N = 4,659). Overall, nostalgia inductions increased positive and ambivalent affect, but did not significantly alter negative affect. The magnitude of nostalgia’s effects varied markedly across different experimental inductions

Accumulating evidence for the unique social, behavioral, and physical health benefits of positive emotion and related well-being constructs has led to the development and testing of positive psychological interventions (PPIs) to increase emotional well-being and enhance health promotion and disease prevention. PPIs are specifically aimed at improving emotional well-being and consist of practices such

While acoustic analysis methods have become a commodity in voice emotion research, experiments that attempt not only to describe but to computationally manipulate expressive cues in emotional voice and speech have remained relatively rare. We give here a nontechnical overview of voice-transformation techniques from the audio signal-processing community that we believe are ripe for adoption in this

The history of emotions has become a thriving focus within the discipline of history, but it has in the process gained a critical purchase that makes it relevant for other disciplines concerned with emotion research. The history of emotions is entangled with the history of the body and brain, and with cultural and political history. It is interested in the how and why of emotion change; with the questions

A major paradox of modern happiness gained wide public exposure in 1776 when Thomas Jefferson substituted the phrase “the pursuit of happiness” in place of Locke’s formulation: “life, liberty, and property.” In substituting happiness for property, Jefferson obscured the central hypocrisy of the Revolution, that—as contemporaries complained—the “loudest yelps for liberty” were made by those practicing

In this article, I outline a relational-developmental conception of emotion that situates emotional activity within a broader conception of persons as holistic, relational beings. In this model, emotions consist of felt forms of engagement with the world. As felt aspects of ongoing action, uninhibited emotional experiences are not private states that are inaccessible to other people; instead, they

Vocal affect is a subcomponent of emotion programs that coordinate a variety of physiological and psychological systems. Emotional vocalizations comprise a suite of vocal behaviors shaped by evolution to solve adaptive social communication problems. The acoustic forms of vocal emotions are often explicable with reference to the communicative functions they serve. An adaptationist approach to vocal

This article demonstrates how researchers from both the sciences and the humanities can learn from Charles Darwin’s mixed methodology. We identify two basic challenges that face emotion research in the sciences, namely a mismatch between experiment design and the complexity of life that we aim to explain, and problematic efforts to bridge the gap, including invalid inferences from constrained study

This article explores self-esteem as an episodic self-conscious emotion. Episodic self-esteem is first distinguished from trait self-esteem, which is described as an enduring state related to the subject’s sense of self-worth. Episodic self-esteem is further compared with pride by claiming that the two attitudes differ in crucial respects. Importantly, episodic self-esteem—but not pride—is a function

Support vector machines (SVMs) are being used increasingly in affective science as a data-driven classification method and feature reduction technique. Whereas traditional statistical methods typically compare group averages on selected variables, SVMs use a predictive algorithm to learn multivariate patterns that optimally discriminate between groups. In this review, we provide a framework for understanding

The “problem of emotions,” that is, that many of them are both meaningful and corporeal, has yet to be resolved. Western thinkers, from Augustine to Descartes to Zajonc, have handled this problem by employing various forms of mind–body dualism. Some psychologists and neuroscientists since the 1970s have avoided it by talking about cognitive and emotional “processing,” using a terminology borrowed from

In this comment, I indicate several challenges and opportunities—out of the many—for an integrated science–humanities approach to emotions, from the perspective of a historian of the modern sciences of emotions.

This comment addresses opportunities for understanding the social functions of emotion by taking a developmental perspective. I agree that understanding emotions and their development will meaningfully illuminate understanding of prosociality in everyday life. Taking Vaish and Hepach’s (2020) approach one step further, I suggest that rather than using the framing of questions about prosociality from

We provide a short review on the recent and near-future developments of computational processing of emotion in the voice, highlighting (a) self-learning of representations moving continuously away ...

The processing of emotional nonlinguistic information in speech is defined as emotional prosody. This auditory nonlinguistic information is essential in the decoding of social interactions and in o...

The purpose of this article is to open a dialogue between research in social sciences concerning collective emotion and historical investigation concerning a religious and political movement of the Middle Ages. The main idea is to consider the Flagellant movement of 1260 as a collective emotion which, beyond the affects pertaining to it, is also a social practice that finds its efficiency in the spiritual

This article explores how historians of emotions and historians of the senses can collaborate to write a history of emotional experience that takes seriously the corporeality of emotions. It investigates how smell, feelings of disgust, and the moral judgments associated with these feelings were interrelated in 20th-century German cancer history. It demonstrates that this complex decisively shaped the

This comment on Main and Kho’s suggestion for “a relational framework for integrating the study of empathy in children and adults” (2020) takes a conversation analytic perspective. First, I will summarize how empathy is conceptualized within conversation analysis (CA), an observational approach that aims at reconstructing naturally occurring social interaction. Second, Main and Kho’s suggestions for

Most research on cross-cultural emotion recognition has focused on facial expressions. To integrate the body of evidence on vocal expression, we present a meta-analysis of 37 cross-cultural studies...

Ruba and Repacholi (2020) review an important debate in the emotion development literature: whether infants can perceive and understand facial configurations as instances of discrete emotion categories. Consistent with a psychological constructionist account (Lindquist & Gendron, 2013; Shablack & Lindquist, 2019), they conclude that infants can perceive valence on faces, but argue the evidence is far

This comment explores the use of behavioral measures in the developmental study of guilt and gratitude reviewed by Vaish and Hepach (2020). Although the use of behavioral measures in developmental emotion research might be seen as a limitation in that researchers cannot be sure that young children are actually experiencing guilt or gratitude, behavioral measures have several advantages over self-report

In their review, Ruba and Repacholi summarize the methods used to assess preverbal infants’ understanding of emotions, and analyze the existing evidence in light of classical and constructionist accounts of emotional development. They conclude that aspects of both accounts are plausible and propose a perceptual-to-conceptual shift in infants’ emotional development. In this comment, we clarify the nature

Depression is theorized to be caused in part by biased cognitive processing of emotional information. Yet, prior research has adopted a reductionist approach that does not characterize how biases in cognitive processes such as attention and memory work together to confer risk for this complex multifactorial disorder. Grounded in affective and cognitive science, we highlight four mechanisms to understand

Cultural variants may spread by being more appealing, more memorable, or less offensive than other cultural variants. Empirical studies suggest that such “emotional selection” is a force to be reckoned with in cultural evolution. We present a research paradigm that is suitable for the study of emotional selection. It guides empirical research by directing attention to the circumstances under which

Why do people with psychopathology use less adaptive and more maladaptive strategies for negative emotions if such usage has self-destructive consequences? Although researchers have examined the reasons for people’s engagement in maladaptive “behaviors,” such as nonsuicidal self-injury, surprisingly little attention has been paid to the reasons why people might endorse maladaptive emotion regulation

I strongly agree with Main and Kho’s primary contention that a relational approach can provide clarity regarding how empathy-related processes become increasingly coordinated over the lifespan. However, I go further to suggest that their “relational approach” should be expanded to include the larger social, cultural, economic, political, and moral contexts that shape and influence more intimate interpersonal

Humans rely heavily on their prosocial relationships. We propose that the experience and display of prosocial emotions evolved to regulate such relationships through inhibiting individual selfishness in service of others. Two emotions in particular serve to meet two central requirements for upholding prosociality: gratitude motivates maintenance of ongoing prosocial interactions, and guilt motivates

Regulating affective responses to acute stress has the potential to improve health, performance, and well-being outcomes. Using the biopsychosocial (BPS) model of challenge and threat as an organizing framework, we review how appraisals inform affective responses and highlight research that demonstrates how appraisals can be used as regulatory tools. Arousal reappraisal, specifically, instructs individuals

The nature of envy has recently been the subject of a heated debate. Some researchers see envy as a complex, yet unitary construct that despite being hostile in nature can lead to both hostile and nonhostile reactions. Others offer a dual approach to envy, in which envy’s outcomes reflect two types of envy: benign envy, involving upward motivation, and malicious envy, involving hostility against superior

This article systematically reviews studies investigating the effect of three operationalizations of complexity in emotion experience (i.e., differentiation, covariation, and variability) on situational behavioral adaptation (i.e., physiological, cognitive, and overt action responses), and quantifies the results with meta-analyses. Twenty-seven studies of emotion complexity were identified and divided

Emotions signal flaws in the person’s anticipation systems, or in other words, in aspects of models of how the world works. As these models are essentially shared in society, emotional challenges experienced by any individual are of relevance to the community of others. Emotions emerge at the heart of the individual experience, the only place where collective knowledge can be tested against the world