Lisa Feldman Barrett

Core Affect, Prototypical Emotional Episodes, and Other Things Called Emotion: Dissecting the Elephant

What is the structure of emotion? Emotion is too broad a class of events to be a single scientific category, and no one structure suffices. As an illustration, core affect is distinguished from prototypical emotional episode. Core affect refers to consciously accessible elemental processes of pleasure and activation, has many causes, and is always present. Its structure involves two bipolar dimensions. Prototypical emotional episode refers to a complex process that unfolds over time, involves causally connected subevents (antecedent; appraisal; physiological, affective, and cognitive changes; behavioral response; self-categorization), has one perceived cause, and is rare. Its structure involves categories (anger, fear, shame, jealousy, etc.) vertically organized as a fuzzy hierarchy and horizontally organized as part of a circumplex.

The brain basis of emotion: A meta-analytic review

Researchers have wondered how the brain creates emotions since the early days of psychological science. With a surge of studies in affective neuroscience in recent decades, scientists are poised to answer this question. In this target article, we present a meta-analytic summary of the neuroimaging literature on human emotion. We compare the locationist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories consistently and specifically correspond to distinct brain regions) with the psychological constructionist approach (i.e., the hypothesis that discrete emotion categories are constructed of more general brain networks not specific to those categories) to better understand the brain basis of emotion. We review both locationist and psychological constructionist hypotheses of brain-emotion correspondence and report meta-analytic findings bearing on these hypotheses. Overall, we found little evidence that discrete emotion categories can be consistently and specifically localized to distinct brain regions. Instead, we found evidence that is consistent with a psychological constructionist approach to the mind: A set of interacting brain regions commonly involved in basic psychological operations of both an emotional and non-emotional nature are active during emotion experience and perception across a range of discrete emotion categories.

Independence and bipolarity in the structure of current affect.

The independence of positive and negative affect has been heralded as a major and counterintuitive finding in the psychology of mood and emotion. Still, other findings support the older view that positive and negative fall at opposite ends of a single bipolar continuum. Independence versus bipolarity can be reconciled by considering (a) the activation dimension of affect, (b) random and systematic measurement error, and (c) how items are selected to achieve an appropriate test of bipolarity. In 3 studies of self-reported current affect, random and systematic error were controlled through multiformat measurement and confirmatory factor analysis. Valence was found to be independent of activation, positive affect the bipolar opposite of negative affect, and deactivation the bipolar opposite of activation. The dimensions underlying D. Watson, L. A. Clark, and A. Tellegens (1988) Positive and Negative Affect schedule were accounted for by the valence and activation dimensions. A consensus on a descriptive structure of current affect is at hand—if we can only agree on what the structure is. The psychology of mood, emotion, and affect needs a consensual structure and is tantalizingly close to achieving one. Among the remaining disagreements, the most puzzling and persistent is bipolarity versus independence. Is positive affect the bipolar opposite of, or is it independent of, negative affect? Are happiness and sadness two ends of one continuum, or separate entities, like apples and oranges? A resolution to this puzzle is needed to answer questions about the number of dimensions of affect, how affect should be measured, and the underlying processes involved. Despite repeated attempts, a solution to this puzzle remains elusive, and a long-simmering debate has recently flared up. Much is at stake in this debate, for important lines of research have arisen on these opposing assumptions. This article offers conceptual and empirical analyses aimed at resolving the dispute.

Are Emotions Natural Kinds

Laypeople and scientists alike believe that they know anger, or sadness, or fear, when they see it. These emotions and a few others are presumed to have specific causal mechanisms in the brain and properties that are observable (on the face, in the voice, in the body, or in experience)—that is, they are assumed to be natural kinds. If a given emotion is a natural kind and can be identified objectively, then it is possible to make discoveries about that emotion. Indeed, the scientific study of emotion is founded on this assumption. In this article, I review the accumulating empirical evidence that is inconsistent with the view that there are kinds of emotion with boundaries that are carved in nature. I then consider what moving beyond a natural-kind view might mean for the scientific understanding of emotion.

Intimacy as an Interpersonal Process" The Importance of Self-Disclosure, Partner Disclosure, and Perceived Partner Responsiveness in Interpersonal Exchanges

H. T. Reis and P. Shavers (1988) interpersonal process model of intimacy suggests that both self-disclosure and partner responsiveness contribute to the experience of intimacy in interactions. Two studies tested this model using an event-contingent diary methodology in which participants provided information immediately after their social interactions over 1 (Study 1) or 2 (Study 2) weeks. For each interaction, participants reported on their self-disclosures, partner disclosures, perceived partner responsiveness, and degree of intimacy experienced in the interaction. Overall, the findings strongly supported the conceptualization of intimacy as a combination of self-disclosure and partner disclosure at the level of individual interactions with partner responsiveness as a partial mediator in this process. Additionally, in Study 2, self-disclosure of emotion emerged as a more important predictor of intimacy than did self-disclosure of facts and information.

Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion

In this article, I introduce an emotion paradox: People believe that they know an emotion when they see it, and as a consequence assume that emotions are discrete events that can be recognized with some degree of accuracy, but scientists have yet to produce a set of clear and consistent criteria for indicating when an emotion is present and when it is not. I propose one solution to this paradox: People experience an emotion when they conceptualize an instance of affective feeling. In this view, the experience of emotion is an act of categorization, guided by embodied knowledge about emotion. The result is a model of emotion experience that has much in common with the social psychological literature on person perception and with literature on embodied conceptual knowledge as it has recently been applied to social psychology.

Individual Differences in Working Memory Capacity and Dual-Process Theories of the Mind

Dual-process theories of the mind are ubiquitous in psychology. A central principle of these theories is that behavior is determined by the interplay of automatic and controlled processing. In this article, the authors examine individual differences in the capacity to control attention as a major contributor to differences in working memory capacity (WMC). The authors discuss the enormous implications of this individual difference for a host of dual-process theories in social, personality, cognitive, and clinical psychology. In addition, the authors propose several new areas of investigation that derive directly from applying the concept of WMC to dual-process theories of the mind.

The Structure of Current Affect Controversies and Emerging Consensus

For some years now, emotion researchers have debated a series of issues related to the structure of consciously experienced affective states. The present article reviews evidence that current affective experience can be summarized by a structure that is anchored by two bipolar but independent dimensions of experience, pleasure and activation. Four issues have presented themselves as central to the nature of this structure: the number of dimensions necessary to describe the space, the bipolarity of the dimensions, whether the structure displays a circumplex shape, and the definition of the activation dimension. Points of consensus and the remaining controversies regarding each issue are presented.

An introduction to computerized experience sampling in psychology

Experience-sampling procedures enable researchers to record the momentary thoughts, feelings, and actions of people in daily life. The authors explain how palmtop computers have expanded the repertoire of experience-sampling techniques and reduced or eliminated some traditional problems with pen-and-paper methods. As a running example, they illustrate the capabilities of the Experience Sampling Program (ESP), their configurable, freely distributable software environment for designing and running experience-sampling studies on Palm Pilots and Windows CE palmtops.

Structure of Self-Reported Current Affect: Integration and Beyond

Current affect has been described with various dimensions and structures, including J. A. Russells (1980) circumplex, D. Watson and A. Tellegens (1985) positive and negative affect, R. E. Thayers (1989) tense and energetic arousal, and R. J. Larsen and E. Dieners (1992) 8 combinations of pleasantness and activation. These 4 structures each presuppose bipolar dimensions and have been thought of as interchangeable or 45° rotations of one another, but past data were inconsistent. Huge but not perfect overlap among these four structures was found here in 2 studies of self-reported current affect (Ate = 198 and 217) that controlled for random and systematic errors of measurement. The 4 structures were integrated into a common space defined by 2 bipolar dimensions.