How does the emotional experience evolve? Feeling generation as evidence accumulation.

Abstract

How do people answer the question How do you feel? In the present work, participants were given 2 tasks in each trial. They first indicated whether a picture made them feel pleasant (or was supposed to be felt as pleasant, in another group), and then made gender decisions regarding faces. Evidence accumulation modeling showed that (a) reporting genuine feeling is qualitatively different from reporting the supposed feeling; (b) reporting one s feeling is remarkably similar to gender decisions; and (c) evidence regarding negative feelings accumulates more quickly than in positive feelings. These results support the assumption that when asked, participants report genuine as opposed to supposed feelings and strengthen the analogy between feeling reports and perceptual decisions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).