Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion

Abstract

Humans experience emotion. For many, experience serves as an emotion's central and defining aspect. We feel the heat of anger, the despair of sadness, the dread of fear. Most days, at least in North America, each of us asks and answers about our emotional state. We talk about our experiences of emotion over coffee, or during a telephone conversation, or in a therapist's office. All things being equal, we assume that experiencing an emotion gives us introspective access to the emotion itself. When an emotion is triggered, we feel it, in much the same way that we feel hunger before a meal.In psychological science, researchers often assume that people experience emotion because people have "emotions"-internal mechanisms for a small set of reactions (typically happiness, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and interest) that, once triggered, can be measured in a clear and objective fashion. Emotions such as anger, sadness, and fear are treated as entities that scientists can make discoveries about-and for better or worse, this assumption shapes the scientific treatment of emotion experiences. It is assumed that people feel fear when their fear mechanism has triggered, such that this feeling shapes perception and decision making and can have important consequences for social relationships.Although there is accumulating evidence that the experience of emotion can have great consequence for subsequent thoughts, decisions, and behaviors, it remains unclear whether such experiences issue from separate mechanisms for anger, sadness, fear, and so on. The goal of this article is to explore how scientists might understand the experience of emotion if this view of emotions is set aside. I sketch a framework for one such model that is more consistent with the empirical evidence on emotion and incorporates existing research on psychological mechanisms more broadly. The result is a model of emotion that has greater explanatory power for understanding the richness and diversity of emotional life.To begin the article, I argue that many contemporary models of emotion are guided by the assumption that emotions are entities, and I examine the consequences of this assumption for the scientific study and measurement of emotion experience. Next, I briefly review the literature and conclude that these assumptions are not well grounded in the available empirical evidence. This frames an emotion paradox: Our everyday experiences of anger, sadness, fear, and several other emotions are compelling, but they are scientifically elusive and defy clear definition.The next major section of the article then explores the idea that people experience emotion in the same way that they see color or the way that they perceive behaviors in others: People use knowledge to parse and conceptualize the bottom-up information that is sensorially given. I sketch a framework where the ex- 20

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