445818
2012
EMR4410.1177/1754073912445818Mulligan & SchererEmotion Review
Toward a Working Definition of Emotion
Emotion Review
Vol. 4, No. 4 (October 2012) 345­–357
© The Author(s) 2012
ISSN 1754-0739
DOI: 10.1177/1754073912445818
er.sagepub.com
Kevin Mulligan
Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Department of Philosophy, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Klaus R. Scherer
Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, Switzerland
Abstract
A definition of emotion common to the affective sciences is an urgent desideratum. Lack of such a definition is a constant source
of numerous misunderstandings and a series of mostly fruitless debates. There is little hope that there ever will be agreement
on a common definition of emotion, given the sacred traditions of the disciplines involved and the egos of the scholars working
in these disciplines. Our aim here is more modest. We propose a list of elements for a working definition of emotion and discuss
the justification for the inclusion of elements from our respective perspectives (philosophy and psychology). This working partial
definition may at least serve as a litmus test to examine theories of emotion, old and new, across disciplinary boundaries.
Keywords
action tendencies, components of emotion, definition of emotion, emotion episodes, feeling
There is no commonly agreed-upon definition of emotion in any
of the disciplines that study this phenomenon. This fact leads to
endless debates and hampers the cumulative progress of research.
It also constitutes a major impediment to interdisciplinary
dialogue and research collaboration. Here we attempt, from the
vantage point of philosophy and psychology, to propose a
working partial definition that could at least provide an inventory
of the major elements of a relatively uncontroversial definition,
taking as our starting points the meaning of the term in natural
languages and common scientific usage.
Of course there is concern about which natural language to
choose and at what time, given that there are thousands of
languages and historical changes in meaning (the word emotion
itself, despite its Latin roots, being only in vogue in some European
languages since the 16th century; Online Etymology Dictionary,
2001–2012). However, as often in the debate between universalism
and cultural specificity, upon detailed investigation, it turns out
that although there are interesting and important linguistic and
cultural differences, there is a large degree of universality for
terms concerning fundamental psychological phenomena. Thus,
although some languages do not have a single word that is a close
equivalent to emotion and some do not have single words for
specific emotions, the phenomenon can be identified in virtually
all languages (Ogarkova, in press). Furthermore, recent work with
a grid-like feature profile analysis (GRID; see Scherer, 2005b) has
shown a massive amount of overlap in the semantic profiles of 24
emotion words across close to 30 languages (Fontaine, Scherer, &
Soriano, in press). We do not believe that efforts to reduce emotion
definitions to different types of primitive feelings (“natural
semantic metalanguage”; Wierzbicka, 1999) are helpful in
attempting a definition of emotion, as it severely reduces the
complexity of the phenomenon in question. Also, as we show in
the section on feelings in this article, this concept is possibly even
more ill defined than emotion, and we insist upon treating feeling
as a component of emotion rather than as a synonym for the term
emotion (see following lines). We will use the term emotion to
refer to the class of affective processes we address in this paper
and the plural emotions to refer to specific types or instantiations
of that class.
We start from the assumption that “having an emotion”
designates a special, delimited episode in the life of an organism
and ponder the factors that determine the beginning and the end
Author note: Preparation of this article was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through the National Center for Competence in Research in the Affective
Sciences grant. The authors acknowledge valuable comments and suggestions by one anonymous reviewer.
Corresponding author: Klaus R. Scherer, Swiss Centre for Affective Sciences, University of Geneva, 7, Rue des Battoirs, 1205 Geneva, Switzerland. Email: [email protected]
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346 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 4
of such an episode, as well as the features that distinguish it
from other types of psychological episodes. We first present our
agreed-upon working partial definition of emotion, proposing a
set of necessary conditions, and then discuss each individual
clause or criterion. In each case, we will first briefly outline the
issues at stake and subsequently argue separately from a
philosophical perspective (Kevin Mulligan—KM) and a
psychological perspective (Klaus Scherer—KS) for a specific
position, ending up with a brief upshot of our joint proposal.
Proposed Working Partial Definition
x is an emotion only if
x is an affective episode
x has the property of intentionality (i.e., of being directed)
x contains bodily changes (arousal, expression, etc.) that are felt
x contains a perceptual or intellectual episode, y, which has the property
of intentionality
the intentionality of x is inherited from the intentionality of y
x is triggered by at least one appraisal
x is guided by at least one appraisal
The Episodic Nature of Emotions
Overview: In the literature, one finds frequent reference to
“emotional states”; sometimes this seems to mean something
that is punctual, sometimes something that lasts or endures. But
of course, emotion is never punctual and only some emotions
endure without variation over time. Emotions typically unfold
dynamically. Emotions have a beginning and an end, although
their exact duration is difficult to specify. In consequence,
emotion should be considered as an episode in the life of an
individual. Although this seems like a fairly uncontroversial
view, there has been some debate about the upper limit of an
emotion’s duration. When should we no longer talk about an
emotion but rather about another type of affective phenomenon?
Klaus Scherer (KS): I think we agree that we should not stray
too far from the way in which the word emotion is used in ordinary
language. Merriam-Webster defines emotion, in its most important
meaning, as “a conscious mental reaction (as anger or fear)
subjectively experienced as strong feeling usually directed toward
a specific object and typically accompanied by physiological and
behavioral changes in the body” (Merriam-Webster, 2012). The
representative examples of use given are “a display of raw
emotion,” “the defendant showed no emotion when the verdict was
read,” and “she was overcome with emotion at the news of her
friend’s death.” All of these have episodic character and I believe
that is how emotion is used in everyday language. The etymology
of the word also supports the primacy of episode: “Middle French,
from ‘émouvoir’ to stir up, from Old French ‘esmovoir,’ from Latin
‘emovēre’ to remove, displace, from e- + movēre to move” (Online
Etymology Dictionary, 2001–2012). Of course, etymologies are
not always good guides to how words are actually used. We often
call grief and being in love (as opposed to love) emotions, and both
of these can last for weeks or even months (cf. Goldie, 2011). Still,
it seems that in popular parlance and in scientific discussion, the
term emotion is generally applied to short-lived phenomena and
this is why I have defined emotion as an episode in the life of an
individual (Scherer, 2001). I am not alone. Although one
occasionally encounters the position that we are more or less
emotional at any point, a sizable number of emotion psychologists
stress the discrete, episodic nature of emotion (e.g., Ekman, 1992;
Frijda, 1986).
Much of the confusion in this area is due to the semantic
overlap of denotations and connotations of the terms affect,
emotion, and feeling and the respective adjectives and adverbs,
as well as a host of other terms such as preferences, emotional
attitudes, moods, affect dispositions, or even interpersonal
stances. I have attempted to differentiate the respective terms by
design feature analysis using the following features: event
focus, intrinsic or transactional appraisal, synchronization,
rapidity of change, behavioral impact, intensity, and duration
(see Table 2 in Scherer, 2005b). Compared with the other
affective phenomena, emotions are focused on concrete events,
objects, and situations, and last a relatively short time.
People often report emotions that last much longer. Empirical
studies of emotion duration have revealed reports of several
months of suffering from a particular emotion, especially
sadness (Scherer & Wallbott, 1994; Scherer, Wranik, Sangsue,
Tran, & Scherer, 2004). How is this to be reconciled with the
assumption that emotions consist of relatively brief episodes?
The answer may lie in the fact that emotion consists of different
components and that one of these is subjective feeling (see
following lines). If feelings are linked to objects, then people
will perceive a certain continuity whenever the object and the
associated feeling come to mind. Thus, the death of a loved
person is obviously the trigger for numerous episodes of feeling
sad about loss. This may consist of short periods of relived
emotions but the emotions themselves do not continue, only the
feelings. However, it is difficult to find the respective cutoff
levels, especially for moods.
Kevin Mulligan (KM): The attraction for the affective
scientist of restricting the class of emotions to episodes is
obvious: Such episodes are what lend themselves most easily to
experiment. But many philosophers distinguish between two
types of emotion: episodes and emotional states or dispositions,
between a momentary outburst of anger or a fleeting admiration
of an elegant ankle, on the one hand, and the long-lasting hatred
of the nationalist or the reverence of the religious believer, on
the other hand. Bennett and Hacker (2008), for example,
distinguish between two types of emotions—perturbations and
emotional attitudes. Indeed some philosophers prefer to reserve
the term emotion for long-lasting states or dispositions.
Reports about long-lasting sadness and grief, like the category
of “shame-proneness” (Tangney, 1995) or guilt-proneness, seem
to rely on two distinct categories. First, there is the idea of
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Mulligan & Scherer Working Definition of Emotion 347
recurrent episodes—sadness, shame, guilt. Then there is the
category of long-lasting tendencies. But what is an episode?
Philosophers call episodes occurrents. They are things which
happen. The type of episode you are interested in is complex
episodes, occurrents, which have other occurrents as parts. Your
aim is to specify the components that are essential to emotions
and their interrelations. More exactly, you are interested in
relatively short-lived episodes. Episodes may be short-lived or
long-lived. But the word short-lived is, like the word tall, elliptic.
To be tall is to be tall in comparison with some average or
reference class. In affective science, “episode” is often used to
refer to processes or occurrents of relatively short duration. The
relevant maximal period of time seems to be the period in
between two periods of dreamless sleep (Mulligan, 1998).
Philosophers often distinguish between occurrents and endurants.
Occurrents happen, endurants last, endure. One type of endurant,
if common sense is to be believed, is ordinary things and persons.
Another type of endurant is states. Like things and animals,
states endure or continue. Unlike processes, they have no actual
parts, although they can be partitioned. On one common view,
states are a type of continuant—they last. The category of states
has often been applied to affective phenomena: Someone can be
in a state of sadness, in a mood or state of melancholy, despair, or
bliss. Moods are states or frames of mind. “Moods,” say Bennett
and Hacker, “may be occurrent or longer-term dispositional
states” (Bennett & Hacker, 2008, p. 166). Arousal is often
categorized as a state: Someone is in a state of arousal, in pain.
Some states can vary in intensity: a pain can become more
intense, more sharp. One argument sometimes given against
identifying arousal and emotions is that arousal may carry on,
endure, after an emotion has occurred.
Strictly speaking, no endurant can be part of an occurrent or
vice versa. But perhaps no harm will come of speaking of shortlived states as parts of episodes. And in a loose sense, we can also
say that short-lived tendencies are parts of emotions (Hastings,
Ceusters, Smith, & Mulligan, 2011; Smith & Grenon, 2004).
What Is Special about Emotion Episodes?
KM: The boundaries between conceptual, definitional, and
terminological issues in theories of emotions are by no means
sharp. These issues are handled in different ways in different
fields—in cognitive science, the humanities, neuroscience,
psychology, psychiatry, and philosophy of mind. In these and
other fields, different more or less theoretically loaded jargons
tend to establish themselves. Matters are complicated by the
fact that in many languages the word fields for emotions and
related phenomena are considerably larger than the word fields
for other types of mental or psychological activities and states
(such as perception, reasoning, desire, memory, expectation).
Consider, for example, the following small selection of English
words for emotions or other affective phenomena:
anger, appetite, astonishment, awe, bliss, boredom, care, cheerfulness,
contempt, delight, despair, disgust, displeasure, embarrassment, enjoyment,
envy, fear, fun, gladness, gratitude, grief, guilt, happiness, hate, hope,
humiliation, indignation, interest, jealousy, joy, love, pain, panic, pleasure,
preference, pride, rancor, regret, resentment, reverence, sadness, satisfaction,
scorn, shame, surprise, sympathy, terror.
A second complication stems from the fact that this large range
of ordinary-language terms can be classified with a small family
of terms or superordinates: affect, affection, emotion, feeling
(the noun), mood, passion, and sentiment.
There seems to be no agreed term for what these terms have
in common. Hence, the widespread use of either emotion or
feeling as terms with both a wide and a narrow sense, or of
expressions such as affective phenomena to designate what
affects, emotions, feelings, moods, passions, and sentiments,
have in common. Yet another feature of the language of
emotions is the fact that the family affect, affection, emotion,
feeling, and so forth, and what falls under them, are often
categorized with the help of two further families of terms.
First,
disposition, episode, event, occurrent, process, tendency, state,
a family whose use is, of course, not restricted to talk about
psychological or mental phenomena, but applies to both
psychological and physical items. Second, a family of terms
used to talk about both affective and nonaffective mental or
psychological phenomena:
agitation, attitude (Einstellung, Stellungnahme), perturbation, response,
feeling (the verbal noun), sensation
Thus we have, it seems, the following tree:
I. disposition, episode, event, occurrent, process, state
II. agitation, attitude (Einstellung, Stellungnahme), perturbation,
response …
III. affect, affection, emotion, feeling, mood, passion, sentiment
IV. anger, appetite, astonishment, awe, bliss, boredom, care …
Upshot: Because there clearly are emotional episodes, we agree
on the following two stipulations: (a) to reserve the term emotion
henceforth for short-lived affective episodes and (b) to reserve
the expression affective phenomena for affects, affections,
feelings, moods, passions, sentiments, and so forth, where these
are not emotions in the stipulated sense. We will return to the
issue of how to determine where an emotion episode starts and
when it ends after having discussed the features of intentionality
and the idea of components of emotions.
Intentionality (Directed Toward an Object)
Overview: As many philosophers have argued, what is essential
to emotions is that they have or appear to have an object. The
object can be a thing (a painting), an organism (a dog), a natural
event (a storm), the behavior of other people (a threat), my own
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348 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 4
behavior (doing something forbidden), or a sudden memory
recall of any of these things. This requirement excludes the pain
in my foot, agreeable sensations, and also the melancholy I feel
all afternoon from the category of emotions: they have no
objects; they are not about anything specific. From this view,
emotions are like many other psychological states and episodes
in that they are intentional; that is, they take objects beyond
themselves. Just as any belief is a belief that such and such is the
case and every memory is a memory of something, so too anger
is anger about something or someone, jealousy is directed at a
rival, and shame is self-directed. Psychologists have generally
taken the directedness of emotions for granted, partly because
most emotion theorists have adopted Darwin’s view that
emotions are functional in that they prepare adaptive responses
to challenges—something that clearly requires directedness.
KS: It seems that one challenge for a satisfactory theory of the
emotions is to accommodate two facts. First, emotions are
intentional episodes that have objects—a term that, if I have
understood the philosophical jargon, subsumes things, persons,
dogs, qualities, properties, processes, events, situations—and
causes (Deonna & Scherer, 2009): My fear of an elephant might
have been caused by rumors concerning the behavior of elephants;
the object of my fear is the elephant, but the cause is the rumors.
Second, emotions involve feelings (which tend to reflect bodily
reactions). The correct attitude to overintellectualist conceptions
of the emotions, ancient or contemporary, is not to drop the object
in favor of nonintentional accounts. The tendency in psychology
and cognitive science to give up objects and intentionality and to
concentrate on feelings is as an overreaction. In natural languages,
emotions are typically individuated by reference to their objects. A
theorist may reject this approach, but the onus of proof is on her.
KM: The philosophical theory of the “aboutness” of
psychological episodes and states is a minefield. We do not have
space to even attempt to relate the talk by psychologists about
external or internal stimulus events or information to the
philosophical accounts of intentionality. (It is sometimes argued
that pain is about or of something, bodily damage, and that even
moods have an object, albeit an extremely indeterminate one).
But a couple of distinctions philosophers make may illustrate
just what the intentionalist approach that we both favor involves.
Many theories of emotion assert that cognitive and perceptual
changes are either a constituent of or a necessary condition of
emotions. Instances of every kind of cognitive and perceptual
change can trigger or be part of emotions. A distinction that runs
through all different types of cognitive and perceptual changes is
that between propositional and nonpropositional episodes and
states, between x sees/hears/remembers y, on the one hand, and x
believes/remembers/expects that p, on the other hand. One
common but by no means uncontroversial way of distinguishing
between these two types of intentionality is to say that in the
second, but not in the first case, a subject stands in an intentional
relation to a proposition, the type of thing expressed by the “that
clause,” which can be logically quite complex (“Sam desires that
if Maria turns up, then his sister or his brother leaves the party”).
One reason for thinking that this distinction is important for
psychological theory is the view that propositional attitudes or
states involve conceptual representations and nonpropositional
cognitive and perceptual episodes need not involve concurrent
deployment of conceptual representations. A further distinction
is that between the “simple” nonpropositional episodes and
states just mentioned and, for example:
x sees y as an N
x sees a dog as a cat
So let’s say that a necessary component of an emotion is an
episode of seeing something, hearing, remembering something…
seeing that something is the case, seeming to see that something
is the case, judging or remembering that something is the case,
expecting that something is the case, seeing something as
something, and so on. These perceptual, cognitive, intellectual
episodes are sometimes called the basis of an emotion. They can
occur without the emotion, but no emotion can occur without
one of these bases.
This view strongly suggests that the aboutness of emotions is
inherited from the aboutness of their bases. Admiration of
someone’s performance is about that performance because it is
based on, for example, a perception of that performance. It also
suggests a perhaps important distinction between emotions that
are propositional and those that are not, which parallels the
distinction between propositional and nonpropositional perceptual
and cognitive episodes and states (Montague, 2007), between x
admires/dislikes/is pleased by/jealous of/ashamed of y, on the one
hand, and x regrets/is pleased/hopes that p, on the other hand.
Indeed, even seeing as—seeing a tree as a person—has an
emotional counterpart: x admires y as a dancer, x despises y as a
professor.
Upshot: Emotion should be reserved for intentional episodes
that involve seeing, hearing, feeling, remembering, expecting,
judging, and so forth. The objects of these different perceptual and
intellectual episodes may be external or internal, real or fictitious,
concrete or abstract. It is their intentionality that explains the
intentionality of emotions. If I am afraid of a dog, my fear is about
the dog I see, seem to see, imagine, remember, expect …
The Appraisal and Evaluation of Objects
Overview: The objects—in our wide sense—of emotions have an
impact on the individual that justifies (or seems to justify) the
perturbation and commotion that is engendered. It is generally
assumed that this impact is due to an evaluation of the significance
of the object to the organism. The word evaluation has a
cognitivistic ring to it. But how much cognition is needed to have
an emotion at all? The debate has tended to get bogged down in
semantic quibbles over the definition of cognition (Leventhal &
Scherer, 1987) and there has been little convergence on the issue.
What are evaluation and appraisal? What are their objects?
Value and Valence
KM: Fear of an elephant is fear of the elephant because it is
based on perception of the elephant. But fear of the elephant has
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Mulligan & Scherer Working Definition of Emotion 349
something to do with its (apparent) dangerousness. What exactly
is an evaluation or appraisal of the dangerousness of the
elephant? As far as I can see, affective scientists are not
forthcoming about just what an evaluation is or about what
exactly evaluations are about. This is also true of psychologists
who are skeptical about appraisal theories of the emotions.
Appraisal has now become a generic, technical term that
subsumes not just evaluation, but also valuing, impressions of
value, value feelings, and so on. Clearly there is little hope of
understanding what it is to appraise something without at least a
preliminary account of value. The most general value terms are:
x is good/bad
x is good/bad for y
x is better/worse than y
x is better/worse than y for z
It is good/bad that p
It is better/worse that p than that q
It is good/bad that p for x
It is better/worse that p than that q for x
In addition to these abstract or “thin” terms, there is a bewilder­
ingly large family of “thick” value terms, a family apparently just
as large as the family of emotional terms. For example:
awful, base, beautiful, beauty, barbarian, boor, bullshitter,
careful, charming, civilized, clear-minded, comic, cool, countermodel,
courageous, corrupt … unreasonable, useful, vicious, victim, vile,
villain, vulgar, silly, sublime, wicked, wise, wanker, whin(g)er, whore,
wretch, yob
Different languages have their own more or less untranslatable
favorites (bête, cursi, iki, sympa). Some of these terms are
pejorative and vulgar; some come to swallow up the others in the
hands of the axiologically challenged (cool); some correspond to
the different virtues and vices, ethical (cowardly) and cognitive
(foolish); some are ethical (evil and its opposite, for which
English uses the same term as the opposite of bad, namely,
good); some are political; some refer to what might be called
value persons (cretin, crook, enemy, fool, gentleman, hero).
What is the relation between the thin value terms (properties,
relations) and the thick value terms (properties, relations)? A
weak—but for that reason relatively uncontroversial—claim is
that if it is unjust or shameful … that p, then it is bad that p or it
is bad that p other things being equal. If a person is evil, that is
a bad thing. And so on. My impression is that the great variety
of value is invariably overlooked by psychologists, who
standardly and unrealistically refer to only a handful of ethical
and aesthetic values (Mulligan, 2009a).
I suggest that to evaluate is to judge that something is awful,
bad, base, beautiful … Or to judge that it is good or bad or
unjust or shameful … that p. In ordinary language, to appraise is
just to evaluate. But as a technical term, appraisal seems to
have a much wider use: It covers every sort of impression of
value, positive, negative, or comparative, every sort of taking
something to be valuable. A better term might be valuing
(“werten vs. bewerten” in German; Mulligan, 2009a). But we
are stuck with appraisal. The need for such a general term is
obvious: Many emotions do not involve such relatively highlevel acts as judgments and the conceptual representations these
involve. Many emotions are based simply on the simplest forms
of perception, what were earlier called nonpropositional
emotions.
Once we distinguish clearly between appraisals that are
evaluations, that is, value judgments, and those that are not, it
becomes obvious why even in the appraisal tradition there is so
much reticence about spelling out just what appraisal is. No
doubt there are evaluative judgments. But what exactly are
impressions of value and disvalue, for example, the impression
of danger for a creature that lacks the concept of danger?
Value terms, as described earlier, are merely the tip of an
iceberg: There is the family of terms for different economic
goods and evils, material (a house) and immaterial (education,
knowledge); there is the family of deontic norms and rules,
ethical and nonethical—what we ought and ought not to do,
what we may do; there is the right–wrong family; and the family
of rights, claims, and duties, ethical and nonethical. Philosophers
dispute endlessly over the relations, in particular relations of
priority, between these families. Fortunately, for present
purposes, it is not controversial to claim that emotions and
emotional attitudes have an especially intimate link to values
and goods. When appraisal theorists allude to “values and
norms,” they are referring to this iceberg, the complexity of
which is rarely appreciated (Mulligan, 2009b).
KS: Philosophers focus on values, psychologists talk about
“valence.” What is the relation between values and valence?
Psychologists distinguish many different types of valence—
object valence, situation valence, the valence of emotions,
expression valence. It is useful to examine the historical origin
of the valence notion. Valence was introduced by Tolman as a
translation of the German term Aufforderungscharakter,
proposed by the Gestalt psychologists (Colombetti, 2005). Of
particular importance for the adoption of the term valence was
Lewin’s (1938) use of it in his field theory to refer to the forces
that attract us to (apparently) desirable or valuable objects and
repel us from (apparently) undesirable or disvaluable ones. This
shows the close connection to the term value. Today, there is
convergence on the leading role of what is generally called the
“valence dimension” in explanations of most of the variance in
data on emotional experience (Fontaine, Scherer, Roesch, &
Ellsworth, 2007). This has led to the proposal that a rudimentary
“core affect” can be described by its position in a twodimensional space constituted by valence and arousal (Russell,
2003). The use of the term has been considerably extended
since, including the designation of emotions as positively or
negatively valenced, leading to a certain loss of the motivational
connotation of the original use of the term. I suggest returning
to the original proposal by Lewin, using the term in the sense of
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350 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 4
a force of attraction or avoidance of an object (person, thing, or
event) produced by appraisal or judgment from different criteria
of relevance. When sufficiently intense, this force is likely to
enter mental representation as a feeling of pleasure and feeling
good (or displeasure and feeling bad).
KM: I suggest that valence is just value. If that is right, two
things follow. First, the object of an emotion is taken to have a
positive (pleasant, pretty, charming) or negative value (shoddy,
unkind), that is to say, positive or negative valence. Second, to say
that an emotion has a positive or negative valence is just to say
that it has positive or negative value: A particular state of being
displeased has negative value, as it is unpleasant; admiration is
pleasant; and so on. The valence or value of emotions is, however,
a complicated matter: Perhaps there are emotions that have no
valence, neutral emotions such as surprise; perhaps some
emotions, for example, anger, have mixed values. Then it is
important to distinguish between the valence or value of a type of
emotion and the valence or value of a particular emotion in a
context. Some philosophers also think that emotion valence is a
function of the object valence of the object of the emotion.
Lewin’s observation that objects with positive valence attract
and objects with negative valence repel, an observation also made
by early phenomenologists such as Scheler, is, I think, an
important one. Unfortunately, ever since Darwin wrote about
attraction, the phenomenon has been little studied. What exactly
are attraction and repulsion? Presumably they are not themselves
emotions. Lewin’s use of the category of force is, I think, obscure.
Indeed it was heavily criticized at the time. I believe value
properties, as opposed to our intentional relations to them, are not
causally efficacious. But perhaps we can say that awareness of
value gives rise to tendencies that we ascribe by saying that a
subject is attracted or repelled by this or that. One such tendency
is perhaps appetite, as opposed to hunger (Katz, 1932).
The Central Role of Relevance
KS: It was the pioneering work of Arnold (1960) and Lazarus
(1966) in psychology and of Kenny (1963) and Lyons (1980,
1999) in philosophy that reasserted the traditional central role of
appraisal in eliciting and differentiating emotional reactions.
From their ideas, research activity started to theoretically refine
and empirically buttress the assumption that emotions are based
on evaluations and appraisals of the significance or relevance of
events and other objects (see Scherer, Schorr, & Johnstone, 2001).
Significance is appraised in terms of the perceived relevance for
current needs and goals, including considerations of ability to
cope with consequences and compatibility of the underlying
actions with social norms and self-ideals (see section on selfrelevance). Thus, the issue of personal relevance is central.
KM: Relevance, it seems to me, is a placeholder for many
different phenomena. What is relevant for a subject is typically
what is important or significant for the subject. What is important
or significant for a subject is what has value for a subject. Value
comes in many different kinds, and the little word for can mean
many different things. The most familiar and least controversial
type of value is instrumental value, value relative to the aims,
goals, and projects of a subject. Given some aim, goal, or
desire, whatever makes the realization of the aim possible has
value for the subject, a certain utility. For here does not mean
“according to.” A subject may well not be aware of the value
something has for him. But only some awareness of (apparent)
value plays a role in the genesis of emotions. The most
hackneyed example in the emotion theorist’s tool kit is fear of
a dog. Fear of a dog presupposes some attachment to the value
of one’s physical integrity or life. One’s life is valuable for one
and, in normal cases, this value is not relative to some goal or
preference.
This example also illustrates what is meant by concern,
another placeholder. A concern of many people is the value of
their physical integrity. Attachment to one’s physical integrity is
just one of many different types of long-standing affective
phenomena that we have agreed not to call “emotions.” Examples
of such phenomena are attachment to people, institutions, selfimages; reverence, respect, love, hate; belief in people, Allah,
institutions, the American way, communism; preferences.
KS: Frijda (1986) has suggested that emotions are “relevance
detectors”—once we feel an emotion about an object, we know
that it has relevance for us (although we might have suppressed
this on a conscious level). Two major types of relevance are the
relevance of objects and events with important implications for
our well-being and relevance in terms of morality and self-image.
Object or event relevance. Appraisal theorists (see Ellsworth
& Scherer, 2003) suggest four major criteria or checks of
relevance of the object/event: (a) novelty (suddenness,
unfamiliarity, or unpredictability); (b) intrinsic pleasantness;
(c) goal relevance (pertinence, or conduciveness of a stimulus
or situation for the momentary hierarchy of goals/needs); and
(d) coping potential (checking the extent to which the organism
can deal with a particular object or event regarding degree of
control of the situation and of power to influence the consequences
of an event; the extent to which one can live with the consequences
of an event, i.e., how well one can adjust).
Moral and self-image relevance. There are two major
checks: (a) The internal standards check evaluates the extent to
which an action falls short of or exceeds internal standards such
as one’s personal self-ideal (desirable attributes) or an
internalized moral code. Internalized moral codes can often be
at variance with cultural or group norms, particularly in the case
of conflicting role demands or incompatibility between the
norms or demands of several reference groups or persons; (b) The
external standards check: Social organization in groups implies
shared values and rules concerning status hierarchies, prerogatives,
desirable outcomes, and acceptable and unacceptable behaviors.
The existence and reinforcement of such norms depends on the
emotional reactions of group members to behavior that both
violates and conforms to norms.
KM: Let me go through your claims and put them in the
language of the theory of value: Pleasantness is the value of the
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Mulligan & Scherer Working Definition of Emotion 351
emotion of being pleased and of nonintentional pleasure, the
agreeable sensation. Conduciveness is just the positive extrinsic
value of usefulness. Awareness that one can or cannot cope,
of one’s abilities and inabilities, impotence, powerlessness is
also awareness of the positive value of abilities and of the
negative value of impotence and inability (as in bewilderment,
embarrassment). (This sort of appraisal seems to be crucial to a
particular but often neglected type of pleasure and joy—
Bühler’s discussion of Funktionslust and Csikszentmihalyi’s of
flow are rare exceptions to the rule—which is at the heart of
Aristotle’s philosophy of emotions: pleasure or joy in successful
activity, the flow experience. The experience of resistance and
inability above a certain level, on the other hand, produces
anxiety.) You often also distinguish, in the case of human
emotions, an internal standards check and an external standards
check. The former, we agree, appraises the extent to which an
action or trait falls short of or exceeds internal standards such as
one’s personal self-ideal or an internalized moral code. Selfideals come in at least two kinds, if is right to distinguish
between the intimate and the social self: The self-ideal of the
intimate self is what one takes to be one’s better self. The selfideal of the social self—and if William James is right, each of us
has several social selves—is the self-ideal one wants to present
to others. The external standards check bears on what we called
deontic norms and rules. Just as the appraisal checks define
types of relevance, they also define types of valence. Thus you
distinguish valence as unpredictability, valence as pleasantness,
valence as satisfaction, valence as power, valence as self-worth,
and valence as moral and social worthiness (Scherer, 2010).
And if valence is just value, I agree.
What Is the Relation Between Emotions
and Appraisals?
KM: Possible answers to this question are:
Every emotion is preceded and triggered by at least one appraisal.
Every emotion is preceded and triggered by at least one appraisal and
contains as a part one or more appraisals.
Every emotion contains one or more appraisals but emotions need not be
preceded by appraisals.
Appraisals are not essential to emotions.
Strangely enough, it is difficult to find a clear endorsement of
the last answer even in the writings of those who are or are said
to be hostile to one or another version of the appraisal theory of
the emotions.
KS: Even James, who proposed that emotion is the perception
of bodily symptoms upon encountering a certain event, never
doubted that it is “the overriding idea of the significance of the
event” (James, 1894, p. 518) that produces the bodily symptoms
(see Scherer, 2000, p. 163). Modern psychologists have had
more difficulties with this proposition, perhaps because it
seemed too trivial. Thus, the “nontrivial” Schachter and Singer
(1962) theory of emotion claimed that the emotion a person
feels depends on the interpretation of social cues in the situation,
assuming that the person experiences a feeling of general
arousal that cannot be reasonably explained (see Scherer, 2000).
More recent constructivist theories (Barrett, 2006) go even
further in denying a clear link between an object-based appraisal
and an emotional experience, not making any attempt to explain
what factors determine “core affect” (construed as valence
by arousal). Barrett further claims that the individual’s
categorization and labeling of core affect are constructed by
each individual depending on the respective context.
Most appraisal theorists propose that the appraisals essential
to emotions must be part of—constitutive of—the emotion
(Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003; Frijda, 2007a, 2007b; Scherer,
1999). There is also convergence among many appraisal theorists
that appraisal triggers and thus “causes” an emotion episode. As
appraisal constantly changes in a recursive fashion and integrates
the appraisal of earlier appraisal outcomes and consequences,
there is no simple type of causality involved. In any case, appraisal
is clearly considered as an integral component of the emotion
episode. But it has a special role: It drives the synchronization,
but in a continuous recursive feedback loop. Given the constant
operation of appraisal during the complete emotion episode and
the recursive causality (Williamson & Gabbay, 2005) of the
process, it is difficult to argue that the role of appraisal is merely
and only to precede the emotion onset and that it is not also a part
of the episode, a component of emotion.
KM: Similarly, for over a century some philosophers have
argued that appraisals are constitutive of emotions in the
following way: It is the fear of the dog that reveals or discloses
its danger, the shame one feels that reveals the shamefulness of
one’s past deeds, the indignation one feels observing a situation
that reveals the injustice of the situation. Friends of this sort of
view accept that one can know or believe that a dog is dangerous
without being afraid, that a deed is shameful without being
ashamed. But the most basic type of awareness of value, they
argue, is quasiperceptual and is part and parcel of emotions (for
a survey of such views, see Mulligan, 2010).
According to a rival view, appraisal is indeed essential to
emotion, but the relevant appraisals precede, to begin with, the
emotion. Emotions, it is widely agreed, are responses. As
Wittgenstein and other philosophers put it, an emotion is a
Stellungnahme, an attitude or position taking. According to this
view, an emotion is a response to a prior impression of value or
disvalue. Friends of this view have not, however, been very
successful in explaining what it is to enjoy impressions of value
and disvalue.
One point, however, is common to both philosophies of
emotion. If we use the term cognition for the base of an emotion,
the seeing, hearing, remembering, judging, expecting it is based
on, the information or stimuli that make an emotion about this
or that, it is highly misleading to use the term cognition also for
appraisals. Appraisals are of value, positive, negative, and
comparative. The bases of emotions typically have as their
objects natural objects and their natural properties, the things
that are taken to be valuable or disvaluable.
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352 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 4
KS: Appraisal theories have been criticized by some (e.g.,
Berkowitz & Harmon-Jones, 2004; Zajonc, 1984) for being too
“cognitivistic.” Many critics claim that emotions can be elicited
by basic sensations that may often be processed on an unconscious
level (e.g., sweetness, familiarity, memory associations, and
pain). Appraisal theorists have countered this by arguing that the
evaluation of the significance of an event can occur at very low
levels of processing, including automatic, unconscious appraisals
(Leventhal & Scherer, 1987; van Reekum & Scherer, 1997).
Thus Öhman (1986) has shown that there are a certain number of
stimuli, for which we have evolutionarily prepared, and
automatic appraisal patterns. Images of snakes and spiders, for
example, provide innate signals of danger and are processed
automatically and rapidly. One of the most basic forms of linking
an emotion to an object or event is classic conditioning, that is,
pairing the respective stimulus with other stimuli that have
universal biological significance such as pain- or pleasureinducing stimuli. In other cases, we have well-formed schemata
of fairly automatic appraisals for events that occur frequently in
our life. In other cases, especially new situations, the appraisal is
much more controlled and effortful, requiring associations and
inference. Rather than engaging in vague discussions about the
role of cognition in emotion, we should attempt to determine the
mechanisms underlying these different evaluation and appraisal
processes, including the relevant brain structures and circuits.
Upshot: Most emotion theorists in both philosophy and
psychology, including James and Schachter, have assumed that
some kind of evaluation, interpretation, or other information
processing deals with the relation between the state of the
environment and what is important for the subject that has an
emotional impact. There is now substantial agreement about the
role of appraisal that acknowledges that this can happen at various
levels of brain processing, ranging from completely automatic
unconscious processing to highly effortful representational or
propositional inferences.
The Components of Emotion
Overview: The componential approach has a venerable history.
Three components have long been considered as essential parts of
emotion: motor expression, bodily symptoms/arousal, and
subjective experience. In the past, elicitation of action tendencies
and the preparation for action have been implicitly associated with
emotional arousal (e.g., fight–flight tendencies), but componential
theories explicitly identify motivational consequences as a
component of emotions and propose that action tendencies
differentiate emotions (Frijda, 1986, 1987). However, there is
much debate about the number and nature of these components
and about how these components are organized during emotional
arousal. Scherer (1984, 2001) has proposed a list of components
that have different specific functions and involve different
subsystems of the organism: a cognitive component (appraisal); a
neurophysiological component (historically glossed as “bodily
symptoms”); a motivational component (action tendencies); a
motor expression component (facial and vocal expression); and a
subjective feeling component (emotional experience). On this
view, the components of an emotion episode are the respective
states and processes of the five subsystems, and the emotion
process consists of their coordinated changes over time.
KS: The information processing or cognitive component is
the most important one in a certain sense. Its main function is the
appraisal of the relevance and the implications of an event for the
individual, the results of this process driving the synchronization
process. We have devoted much attention to the appraisal
component, as it is the “driving force.” But what about the
“driven” components? In most cases, emotion-evoking events
require the organism to react, which often implies suspending
ongoing behavior and engaging in a new course of action (Frijda,
1986, 1987, 2007b). Thus thanks to appraisal, emotions have a
strong motivational force that typically produces states of action
readiness (Frijda, 2007b) to help organisms adapt to or deal with
important events in their lives. Action readiness refers to a motive
state pertinent to one’s relationship to some object. The motive
state aims to establish, maintain, or modify one’s relationship
with the external world as a whole, with an object in that world,
or with an object of thought or imagination. Emotions basically
pertain to interaction, mostly interpersonal interaction, and do not
involve readiness for a specific behavior, but for a particular goal
in an interaction (e.g., to avoid conflict with one’s boss). The
overall goal defines the state of action readiness. Several different
actions may be appropriate paths toward reaching the aim and
thus, during the state of readiness, further processing can occur to
determine the optimal alternative under the given situational
circumstances.
KM: Motivational consequences—desires, drives, needs,
urges, intentions—behavioral tendencies, and actual behavior
are certainly associated with many emotions. But they are very
different. Fear makes our long-lasting attachment to our bodily
integrity salient—it engenders an episodic desire to flee (or to
freeze, or to attack) and a number of other preparatory bodily
changes for flight, but fleeing is not the same as the tendency to
flee. More particularly: (a) The action and other types of
behavior that emotions give rise to are surely not components of
the emotion. If x is an immediate consequence of y, then x is
not a part of y. Such action and behavior may be part of the
definition of emotions, but they cannot be part of all emotions.
(b) Tendencies are not episodes. Tendencies are modal creatures,
more than merely actual entities: A creature can have a tendency
to flee without actually fleeing. Tendencies are attributed with
the help of modal expressions such as “would flee if … ” I am
happy to say that certain short-lived tendencies are parts of
certain emotions. But then a tendency is not a part of an emotion
in the same sense in which an arousal is part of an emotion.
KS: The motivational component in definitions of emotion is
ill defined. It is quite striking that in affective science there is
broad agreement that there are affective complex episodes, but
in the psychology of motivation, the term motivation is generally
exclusively used to refer to dispositions. However, the case of
emotion episodes shows that there can be fleeting changes of
motivation. Correctly conceptualizing this component is
important, as it is probably the mediator between appraisal, on
the one hand, and physiological or bodily changes and motor
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Mulligan & Scherer Working Definition of Emotion 353
expression on the other. In other words, although appraisal
drives the other changes in the organism’s subsystems in a
synchronized way to prepare an adaptation to the eliciting event,
it does so via a motivational force. To get back to the simple
case of plain valence and Lewin’s definition of the forces that
attract us or repel us—it is the force generated by the appraisal
outcome that produces the changes in respiration, heart rate,
muscle tension, posture, and facial and vocal expression that
ever since antiquity have been considered a hallmark of emotion
and that are currently referred to under the fashionable name
embodiment.
As to bodily changes, I suggest separating a physiological or
support system component and a motor expression component.
The reason is that the two, although closely connected, serve
different functions, especially given the important role of motor
expression in communication. Neither of these systems are
problematical as components of emotions, as it is obvious that a
variety of physiological changes occur during intense emotions
(see Kreibig, Schaefer, & Brosch, 2010, for a review) and that we
express these emotions in very different ways through the face,
the voice, and the body—generally in such a way that observers
can infer our emotions quite reliably, even across cultures (for a
comprehensive review, see Scherer, Clark-Polner, & Mortillaro,
2011). What is strongly debated and where conclusive evidence is
not yet in, is the existence of prototypical, emotion-specific
response patterns in either physiology or expression. This is not
necessarily part of a definition, and for this reason, we will not
discuss these components in greater detail.
KM: Arousal seems to be an element that is essential to
emotions, but it is not clear what exactly that encompasses.
KS: It may be one of the most misused terms in psychology in
general and particularly in emotion research. The major problem
is that there are different meanings of the word arousal as it is
used in various frameworks in the psychological and philosophical
literature (e.g., sympathetic activation vs. subjective intensity).
One way to combat the level of confusion with this term might be
to explore how various notions of arousal can be conceptualized
as both the effects of detecting relevance and the experiential
presentation of the relevance of the appraised situation. Indeed, if
the arousal level of a given event can be considered as a function
of the subjectively appraised relevance of this event, this facilitates
critical comparison of different theoretical predictions of the
effects of emotional stimuli on memory-related variables related
to attention. Even more important, one needs to distinguish
arousal from activation, a distinction that is often glossed over,
particularly in two-dimensional accounts of affect. Whereas
activation is the more general term, meaning that the organism as
a whole or its different subsystems are in an active, responsive
state, arousal should be limited to the specific activation of the
sympathetic branch of the autonomic nervous system, a state that
is often described as excitation.
Upshot: The fact that emotions are often characterized by
perturbations in their different components, in particular
physiological systems and motor expression, has never been
denied by scholars of emotion across the centuries. However,
the degree of bodily manifestation varies and some emotions,
such as epistemic or aesthetic emotions, may have much subtler
bodily manifestations than the utilitarian, survival emotions
such as fear, anger, or disgust. Currently, the body is in fashion
again and embodiment has become a magic word. James—to
whom we return in what follows—has the merit of having
reminded everyone that bodily proprioception is an important
input into emotion. In the spirit of arguing for component
synchronization in emotion episodes, we reserve a place among
our criteria for bodily changes and the feelings thereof.
Feeling and Feelings
Overview: What is the difference between “having an emotion”
and “feeling something”? We have not included feeling as a
necessary condition in our list of features or criteria for a working
definition of emotion. We realize that in most cases in which the
other necessary criteria apply, the person is likely to be aware of
feeling something and might categorize this as an “emotion” of
sorts, even labeling it with a specific emotion word for easier
communication with the outside world. Yet it is questionable
whether a feeling or even the conceptualization of an experienced
emotional category should be part of the definition of the
phenomenon we are after. As we shall see, this has to do with the
indeterminacy of the term.
KS: One problem is that the noun feeling is regularly used in an
interchangeable fashion, as a synonym of emotion. The problem
started with William James, who claimed, in what he considered a
revolutionary thesis concerning the nature of emotion, “that the
bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact,
and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the
emotion” (James, 1884, p. 190, italics in the original). As Ellsworth
(1994) has pointedly asked about the so-called peripheralist debate:
Is a century of fame worth a century of misunderstanding? Because
a misunderstanding it was (and is). Perhaps impressed by the
vociferous critique of his position, first by his friend Carl Stumpf,
the perceptual psychologist, James, while upholding his idea that
the type of emotion experienced was determined by the perception
of the patterns of bodily changes, hastened to add that the nature of
these bodily changes was in turn determined by the overwhelming
“idea” of the significance of the elements of a situation for the wellbeing of the organism (e.g., the probability that the bear will kill us
or that we will kill it; James, 1894, p. 518). In modern parlance, this
sounds suspiciously close to appraisal of the object’s value and
disvalue related to the organism’s important needs, goals, and
values.
When James asserted that the feeling of the bodily changes is
the emotion, he simply equated the meaning of the words feeling
and emotion. As the 1894 quote shows, he certainly did not
want to claim that emotions have no objects. And his writings
suggest that he did not want to restrict the bodily feedback to the
viscera. Thus in some sense, all that James wanted to do was to
reassert that the feedback from the body is part and parcel of our
emotional experience, something that neither ancient theorists
nor current componential theorists would disagree with. The
problem was aggravated by Schachter and Singer (1962), who
replaced bodily changes by an even vaguer concept, arousal,
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354 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 4
and who made an exceptional case (not knowing where the
arousal comes from) the typical case for emotion, thus justifying
their claim that emotion constituted an attribution based on
social context. It is Schachter, not James, who is at the origin of
current constructivist theories (Barrett, 2006; Russell, 2003).
Given this “century of misunderstanding,” now already into its
second century, I strongly advocate clearly differentiating the terms
emotion and feeling and propose to use feeling as the denominator
for the integrative component of emotion, bringing together
feedback or proprioception from all other components and making
it available for mental representation and communication.
KM: The ways of talking about affective phenomena mentioned
so far are silent about our awareness of anger, appetite, affect,
emotion, and anger. But one important locution is
There is, however, a subtle difference between feeling afraid,
on the one hand, and being aware of one’s fear on the other. We
say things like
x feels ______
Feeling amazed, disgusted, happy, terrified are, it seems,
different ways of feeling rather than different things one feels.
Feel does, however, take an object in the following cases:
x feels the pain in his foot
x feels weary
x feels amazed, disgusted, happy, sick, terrified …
These constructions are not of the form
Subject + Verb + Object
as are the “intentional” locutions
x registers/is aware of/is conscious of/perceives his fear or judges or
sincerely asserts that he is afraid
x feels the pain in his foot
x feels sad
x feels the chills of pleasure in his neck
This locution and what it attributes are important for the
following reasons. First, the concept of feeling something often
creeps into definitions of some or all affective phenomena.
Second, though, if many psychologists and philosophers are to
be believed, there is awareness—perception, representation,
higher order thoughts—of or about one’s intellectual, perceptual,
mnesic, and affective states, episodes, and activities, affective
and conative states and episodes are felt. (So, too, are roughness
and smoothness; feel is used for tactile perception.)
Bennett and Hacker (2008, Chapter 5) solve the problem
we started with of finding the highest superordinate for affective
phenomena by distinguishing between feelings that are affections
and those, like tactile perceptions, that are not. Under the category
of affections they put agitations, emotions, and moods and dis­
tinguish between emotions that are emotional perturbations and
emotions that are emotional attitudes. There is much to be said in
favor of this taxonomy. But feeling in the psychology of emotions
is typically used in a much narrower way. It is one thing to be
afraid of a dog at a time and another thing to be aware of one’s fear.
One form such awareness may take, one might think, is that one
feels afraid. Feeling afraid is not the same thing as perception,
judgments, or conceptual representations of one’s fear.
Conscious is used in many different ways. In one of its
meanings, “to be conscious” is simply a determinable of which
seeing, remembering, admiring, fearing, and judging are
determinates. The relation is like that which holds between the
determinable color and its determinates, such as red and blue. In
this sense, to see is to be visually conscious, to remember is to
be mnesically conscious, to admire is to be affectively conscious,
and to judge is to be judicatively conscious. A distinct and more
popular use of the word is to characterize a certain relation in
which a subject stands to his seeing, remembering, admiring,
and judging. The candidates for this relation are awareness,
registering, perceiving, thinking, and, as we have noted, feeling.
x feels the tingling around his waist
These two uses of feel correspond, it seems, to a difference
between emotions and bodily or affective sensations. Bodily
and affective sensations and vital states may be felt but are not
ways we feel. When we say someone feels amazed, disgusted,
and so forth, we are not ascribing an intentional relation to an
emotion of amazement or disgust. But we do just this when we
say that someone feels fear or grief.
KS: Given the vagaries and pitfalls surrounding the term
feeling, one is tempted to abandon it altogether and replace it
with something like subjective experience or experienced affect.
This experiential component has a special status in the emotion
process, as it monitors and regulates the other components and
enables the individual to communicate her emotional experience
to others. Subjective experience needs to integrate and centrally
represent all information about the continuous patterns of change
and their coherence in all other components, especially if it is to
serve a monitoring function. Thus, feeling is an extraordinarily
complex conglomerate of information from different systems. In
your parlance, this probably means that feeling in this technical
sense has as its object all the synchronized components of the
emotion and the emotion itself.
I have conceptualized the problem with a Venn diagram in
which a set of three overlapping circles represents the different
aspects of feeling (Scherer, 2004, Fig. 9.1). The first circle
(A) represents the reflection or representation of changes in all
synchronized components in some form of monitoring in the
central nervous system, which could be called a neural coherence
cluster (Scherer, 2009). The second circle (B), which only
partially overlaps with the first, represents that part of the
integrated central representation that becomes conscious (i.e.,
corresponding to what is generally called feelings). Awareness is
assumed to be generated once a certain degree of synchronization
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Mulligan & Scherer Working Definition of Emotion 355
of the components has been attained (Scherer, 2005a; see
also Grandjean, Sander, & Scherer, 2008). The third circle
(C) represents categorization verbalization—again overlapping
only partially with Circles A and B, given the fixed semantic
meaning of emotion words, which may be more encompassing
than the individual experience.
Categorization and Verbalization of Feeling
KS: Although a richly textured conscious feeling can be highly
functional for adaptation and regulation, it is less well suited for
cognitive manipulation, memorization, or communication. The
same is true for perception and this is why categorization and
labeling play such a major role. Categorization occurs before
verbalization and these prelinguistic groupings form the basis for
the acquisition of concepts and words in very young children
(e.g., Hamlin, Wynn, & Bloom, 2007). To form these idiosyncratic
and “fuzzy” categories of feelings, individuals need to perceive
some regularity in the differential patterning of emotional
experiences. Using Rosch’s (1973) principles, one would expect
that categories form through optimizing cognitive economy and
evaluating the practical importance of certain structures and
regularities encountered during emotion episodes.
KM: In the philosophy of perception, a popular view is that
the most basic type of perception may involve only
nonconceptual content. On this view, we are, for example,
visually aware of a great variety of features of the environment
that we do not actually, and perhaps could not, categorize
conceptually. A more controversial claim is that even the
categories of object, property (e.g., perceptual constancy), and
relation may be used without any actual conceptualization (cf.
Mulligan, 1995, on this view in the history of perceptual
psychology). Many elements of this sort of view seem to carry
over to the theory of internal perception our awareness “from
the inside” of our psychological and bodily states. Here, too, we
are aware of a multiplicity of features and relations without
necessarily using any concepts.
KS: Given recent claims about the importance of “conceptual
acts” (Barrett, 2006) for the existence of emotion, we need to
justify why we do not include feeling, conceptualization, or
labeling in our working partial definition.
KM: Our list of necessary conditions is silent about just what
kinds of emotion there are, whether or not ordinary language is
a reliable guide (Griffiths, 1997). It also leaves open the question
of what sort of a kind emotions are—whether emotion is a
natural kind, in particular, or a biopsychological, mental,
nonnatural, social, or linguistic kind. If there were no emotional
kinds, there could be no affective science. There is a view of
emotions according to which these are things that depend for
their very existence on conceptual categorization or labeling. To
understand this view, it is useful to compare it with the very
plausible view that, for example, social entities are constructed.
Consider the category of judges. No one thinks this category is
a natural kind. Someone is a judge only if he has been declared
a judge (Searle, 2010). The view advanced by Barrett (2006) of
emotions takes emotions to be constructed entities, and
construction here seems to mean very much what it means when
we say that judges are constructed entities. Without the concept
of a judge and without the speech act of declaration or something
that plays a similar role, there would be no judges.
Antirealism about judges—judges do not exist until humans
bring them into being—is plausible. Does an emotion occur
only if it is declared, thought of, conceptualized, or labeled as an
emotion? We are not antirealists about emotions. Consider
another analogous case—the difference alluded to between
simple seeing and propositional seeing. We often see traits and
visual gestalten that are not conceptualized because we do not
possess the relevant concepts. Similarly, is it not plausible to
think that many of the aspects and features of emotions, episodic
processes, cannot be conceptualized by their subjects simply
because these subjects lack sufficiently fine-grained concepts?
(“I would not know how to describe what I feel at the moment”;
“I know that the jealousy I feel now is different from the jealousy
I felt as an adolescent but I cannot for the life of me describe the
difference”.) Now suppose the Barrett view is right. Suppose
that in order to undergo an emotion of type F, it is necessary to
label the emotion as an F. How could a subject learn the meaning
of F if not through correlating a type of experience—before it is
labeled by definition—with a label? (Cf. learning the meaning
of red.) This is why we do not include conceptualization in our
definition of emotions. Only those emotions the bases of which
include concepts—for example, beliefs, judgments—necessarily
involve conceptualization.
Upshot: Our list of essential elements does not include awareness
or consciousness of one or more of the components of emotions
(other than the “feeling” of bodily changes mentioned in the third
criterion), nor a categorization or conceptualization of the episode.
Suppose you contradict your friend, who reacts by getting very red
in the face, displays a strong frown and pressed lips, and speaks
loudly and aggressively. You ask: “Why are you getting in such a
state about this trifling matter?” He says: “I am not angry!” and you
have reason to believe that he is sincere. Is he not angry? We believe
that the popular use of the term emotion covers that case and that
affective scientists would want to study this episode as an exemplar
of emotion, measuring some of the major criteria or components
mentioned earlier by physiological recording, objective analysis of
motor expressions, or even observer judgment. Thus, it seems too
restrictive to require “feeling” of all of the components (or maybe of
any component) as a necessary criterion. This is even more the case
for categorization and verbalization.
Open Questions
We do not offer a conclusion to our deliberations concerning the
essential elements of a working partial definition of emotion,
given the complexity of the issues and the uncertain state of affairs.
Rather, we offer two open questions that we are grappling with.
KS: I am intimately convinced that the degree of integration
and synchronization of the components of emotion are central to
our understanding of emotion (Scherer, 2001, 2005a, 2009).
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356 Emotion Review Vol. 4 No. 4
Although the different subsystems or components operate
relatively independently of each other during nonemotional
states, they are recruited to work in unison during emotion
episodes. I believe that emotion is an integrated process or
whole, just like a melody, of which some of the parts are given
here. Should this integration or some representation (in however
loose a sense of this slippery word) of this special quality not be
included in our elements—even though we do not really know
how to define, let alone measure it? It is because I am tempted
to give affirmative answers to these questions that I do not think
that our definition is complete.
KM: My reason for thinking that our definition is incomplete
is that I think that one important element missing from our list
is a reference to affective modes. In the philosophy of mind, it is
sometimes claimed that belief consists of the mental or
psychological mode of believing plus propositional content,
that desire consists of a mode of desiring plus propositional
content (Mulligan, 1995; Searle, 1983). I agree with Brentano
and Stumpf that there are also affective modes—different types
of emoting, admiring, regretting, and liking—that combine with
content, propositional and nonpropositional. Affective modes
and values seem indeed to be interdependent. But I have never
been able to find an affective scientist prepared to take these
claims seriously.
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