An Eidetic Phenomenology of Emotions: Notes on the Chiasmatic Character of the Emotional Dimension of Existence

Conceptual knowledge is dynamic, fluid, and flexible, changing as a function of contextual factors at multiple scales. The Covid-19 pandemic can be considered a large-scale, global context that has fundamentally altered most people's experiences with the world. It has also introduced a new concept, COVID (or COVID-19), into our collective knowledgebase. What are the implications of this introduction for how existing conceptual knowledge is structured? Our collective emotional and social experiences with the world have been profoundly impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, and experience-based perspectives on concept representation suggest that emotional and social experiences are critical components of conceptual knowledge. Such changes in collective experience should, then, have downstream consequences on knowledge of emotion- and social-related concepts. Using a naturally occurring dataset derived from the social media platform Twitter, we show that semantic spaces for concepts related to our emotional experiences with Covid-19 (i.e., emotional concepts like FEAR)-but not for unrelated concepts (i.e., animals like CAT)-show quantifiable shifts as a function of the emergence of COVID-19 as a concept and its associated emotional and social experiences, shifts which persist 6 months after the onset of the pandemic. The findings support a dynamic view of conceptual knowledge wherein shared experiences affect conceptual structure.

Preface. 1: Emotion Econcepts and What Language Reveals about Them. Introduction: Language and Emotion Concepts Z. Kovecses. Everyday Conceptions of Emotion: A Semantic Perspective A. Wierzbicka. Metaphor and the Folk Understanding of Anger Z. Kovecses. The Heart and the Head: Everydat Conceptions of Being Emotional W.G. Parrott. Prototype Analyses of Emotion Terms in Palau, Micronesia K.D. Smith, D. Tkel-Sbal. Turkish Emotion Concepts: A Prototype Analysis S. Turk Smith, K.D. Smith. Emotions and Emotion Words N.H. Frijda, S. Markam, K. Sato. Everyday Concepts of Emotions Following Every-Other-Day Errors in Joint Plans K. Oatley, L. Larocque. 2: Anthropological Studies of Emotion Concepts. Introduction: Ethnotheories of Emotion J.C. Wellenkamp. American Cultural Models of Embarrassment: The Not-so Egocentric Self Laid Bare D. Holland, A. Kipnis. The Study of Inuit Emotions: Lessons from a Personal Retrospective J.L. Briggs. The Politics of Emotion in Nukulaelae Gossip N. Besnier. 'Caught in the Web of Words': Performing Theory in a Fiji Indian Community D.L. Brenneis. A Sociolinguistic Approach to Emotion Concepts in a Senegalese Community J.T. Irvine. Everyday Conceptions of Distress: A Case STudy from Toraja, Indonesia J.C. Wellenkamp. 3: The Developing Child's Theory of Emotion. Introduction: The Child's Concept of Emotion P.L. Harris. Yougn Children's Conception of Mind and Emotion: Evidence from English Speakers H.M. Wellman. Children's Understanding of Emotion A.S.R. Manstead. The Development of Children's Understanding of Negative Reflexive Social Emotions K. Papadopoulou. Developmental Constraints of Emotion Categories P.L.Harris. Children's Understanding of the Strategic Control of Negative Emotions M. Meerum Terwogt, H. Stegge. Intersubjective Emotions and the Theory of Mind Research: A Cultural Critique M. Karasawa. 4: Social Influences on Conceptions of Emotion. Introduction: Social Psychological Perspectives on Laypersons' Theories of Emotion K.D. Smith. Culture Differences in Emotional Knowledge: A Study in Mexico, Chile, Blegium and the Basque Country (Spain) D. Paez, A.I. Vergara. Naive Theories of Emotional Experience: Jealousy V.L. Zammuner. Emotion Concepts as a Function of Gender A.H. Fischer. The Social Sharing of Emotion as a Source for the Social Knowledge of Emotion B. Rime. Knowing and Labeling Emotions: The Role of Social Sharing G. Bellelli. Expression of Emotion versus Expressions of Emotions: Everyday Conceptions about Spontaneous Facial Behaviour J.M. Fernanandez-Dols, M.A. Ruiz-Belda. The Collective Construction of Self Esteem: Implications for Culture, Self, and Emotion S. Kitayama, H.R. Markus, C. Lieberman. 5: Concluding Comments. Final Session A.S.R. Manstead. The Appeal and Pitfalls of Cross-Disciplinary Dialogues N. Besnier. Afterword J.A. Russell. Index.

Institutionalized children of 7, 11 and 15 years of age were interviewed with regard to their concept of emotion. Questions were posed pertaining to the identification of emotion, the effects of emotion on other psychological processes, and the strategies by which both the display and experience of emotion may be regulated. The results of this study were analysed together with those from an earlier study conducted by Harris, Olthof and Meerum Terwogt (1981) in which non-institutionalized schoolchildren were interviewed. The institutionalized children show the same general (development) shift in their conception of emotions, albeit in a delayed fashion in some cases, as was found in the earlier study for the non-institutionalized schoolchildren. That is to say, whereas the youngest children focus on the publicly observable components of an emotion, the older children also take the hidden mental aspect of an emotion into consideration. The institutionalized children differ from the non-institutionalized children in that they claim to be less attentive to their own emotions as well as those of others; they do not consider it feasible to actually change an emotion; and they consider the effect of emotions to be more detrimental. These results are discussed in terms of a learned helplessness explanation.

Toward a Phenomenology of Emotion in Film:Michael Brynntrup and The Face of Gay Shame Randall Halle (bio) On a neuro-physiological level, the study of emotion has been relatively excluded from studies of cognition in part simply because the emotional and sensory centers in the brain are distinct, but increasingly cognitive science has recognized that these centers are linked, sharing and passing on information and creating responses in as yet not comprehended ways. For the most part though in the 1990s cognitive theory sought to contend with emotions in what we could describe as a neo-Kantian approach, ascribing them to the realm of judgment. Appraisal theory describes emotions as arising in a complex condition of evaluation or appraisal; we experience love because we appraise that we are being treated well.1 However, such a rational judgment model, subsuming emotions into a computational approach, cannot take into account dispositions or temperament that have nothing to do with rational judgments or choices. Suspicions, fears, phobias, anxieties, angst, shame and other negative states can arise contrary to interests or cognitive processes of appraisal, indicating at least some [End Page 683] other component to emotions, i.e. a more primary even drive-based form of affect.2 Thus a turn came in cognitive science with the investigation of affective elements and memory. It might seem like a simple matter of common sense, but the premise that strong emotional-affective experiences can color memories, for instance simply make them more vivid, offered a breakthrough in the consideration of how cognitive representations work. Michael Martinez described the state of research developing out of this insight: "representations are often portrayed as valueless, cool records of information and experience. This portrayal is misleading because represented knowledge very often does have emotional and motivational value; representations are words, images, goals, and plans charged with meaning, valence, emotion, and energy."3 That this "affective turn" began in cognitive science roughly a decade ago and is only now gaining momentum might, from outside the discipline, seem a bit contrary to expectations but we might want to recall that, as psychologist Eleanor Rosch noted, "since the Greeks, Western psychology has treated affect and cognition as separate faculties, states, or processes, and through history cognition has been valued more positively than affect. Emotion tends to be seen as irrational and reason as affectless."4 As the Martinez quote indicates, seeing and perceiving, as fundamentals of cognition, were primarily approached from the camera obscura perspective, as if the image was written innocently on the grey matter of the brain. That perhaps experiences of affect, emotions, or desire could prove more primary, or if they have a fundamental evaluative function, or how they might color cognition with a particular valence is an open field of exploration.5 Inquiry in [End Page 684] this area marks the beginning of the affective turn. It has led to an expansion of new research and new models of perception, emotion, and affect, and it will be of central consideration in this essay.6 There is a second turn of central interest to this essay and that is the turn to cognitive film studies. While cognitive scientists have carefully constructed experiments with visual materials to trace out how perception functions, they have not extensively considered different modes of viewing, different media of seeing.7 Cognitive film studies holds the potential to offer to cognitive scientists a wealth of information and an elaborated language developed over years to describe various aspects of image and viewing, frame and positionality, the embodiment of viewing as it interacts with the constructed viewing space and directed viewing material. Cognitive film studies is a new development, having emerged in the span of the last decade.8 While posing new productive questions, the attempt to develop an interdisciplinary relationship between cognitive science and film studies up until now has resulted mainly in a rather one-sided direction of application.9 Cognitive film studies have primarily sought to adopt [End Page 685] the insights of cognitive science, applying studies developed in very different contexts to the moving image and cinematic space.10 This approach does open up new understanding but it moves in a singular direction...

Emotion concepts are the internally held representations of what defines any given emotion. Contemporary emotion theories posit that emotion concepts occupy a central role in shaping our perceptions and experiences of emotion. However, like other concepts, emotion concepts actively change over the life course. Here, we review classic and contemporary ideas, and recent empirical research, that concern how emotion concepts develop from childhood to adulthood. Emerging evidence suggests that emotion concepts change in complex ways across early life development, which has a tangible impact on the emotional experiences of children, adolescents, and adults. Charting emotion concept development in this way holds implications for basic theories of emotion and development as well as more clinical theories focused on helping children and adolescents overcome emotion-regulatory challenges.

Theories of semantic organization have historically prioritized investigation of concrete concepts pertaining to inanimate objects and natural kinds. As a result, accounts of the conceptual representation of emotions have almost exclusively focused on their juxtaposition with concrete concepts. The present study aims to fill this gap by deriving a large set of normative feature data for emotion concepts and assessing similarities and differences between the featural representation of emotion, nonemotion abstract, and concrete concepts. We hypothesized that differences between the experience of emotions (e.g., happiness and sadness) and the experience of other abstract concepts (e.g., equality and tyranny), specifically regarding the relative importance of interoceptive states, might drive distinctions in the dimensions along which emotion concepts are represented. We also predicted, based on constructionist views of emotion, that emotion concepts might demonstrate more variability in their representation than concrete and other abstract concepts. Participants listed features which we coded into discrete categories and contrasted the feature distributions across conceptual types. Analyses revealed statistically significant differences in the distribution of features among the category types by condition. We also examined variability in the features generated, finding that, contrary to expectation, emotion concepts were associated with less variability. Our results reflect subtle differences between the structure of emotion concepts and the structure of, not only concrete concepts, but also other abstract concepts. We interpret these findings in the context of our sample, which was restricted to native English speakers, and discuss the importance of validating these findings across speakers of different languages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

This paper focuses on human emotions, in view of how human emotions are conceptualized, categorized, and manifested in natural language, from the perspective of the componential appraisal theory of emotion in the first place. The nature of emotion is discussed; the components and functions of emotion are examined. Scientific literature is reviewed on the issue of differentiating emotion from the other types of affect. Feeling as one of the components of emotion proper is individuated in terms of qualia, bearing on phenomenology of human emotions. Certain ways of distributing emotion concepts into emotion categories are shown, based on the linguistic manifestations of these concepts; the key role that language plays in the formation of emotion concepts is emphasized. Basic emotions are characterized in terms of their universal biological nature that is independent of the variety of human languages and cultures. Verbal report on emotions is shown to rely on the cognitive mechanism of awareness and on linguistic naming; virtues and vices of this report are discussed. Emotion qualia are shown to emerge or transform with the emergence or transformation of the words that denote respective emotions, as a unique testimony of the dynamics of emotions in synchrony and in diachrony.

This paper reveals the importance of learning emotion concepts due to the efficiency of emotional granularity during the categorization of emotions. There are two ways of learning emotion concepts that can contribute to emotional granularity. First, we can learn emotion words. Second, we can learn the implicit content of our emotion concepts, i.e. how emotions feel to us. In order to complete the second task, we need to acquire vivid awareness and vivid memory of the implicit content of our emotion concept. I claim that only after completing the second task can we learn emotion words in a way that is efficient for the categorization of emotions. The problem with that claim is that we do not know how to study the implicit content of our emotions, and how to obtain vivid awareness of it. In this article, I sketch a basic solution to this problem. The article has three parts. In the first part, I outline Lisa Barrett’s Conceptual Act View in order to reveal the functional role of emotion concepts in our brains. In the second part, I explain Anna Wierzbicka’s classical attempt to define emotion concepts. In the third part, I suggest how it is possible to study the fine-grained details of our emotional experience in a scientific way. The goal of developing the integrative model is to realize the learner's potential in personalized knowledge formation in an intelligent learning environment and to enhance the efficiency of learning.

The aim of the proposed article is to develop a technique that can be used to identify those emotion concepts (ECs) in the target cultures that most adequately convey the idea of fragments of the emotional world of representatives of the source cultures presented in specific concepts. The technique is tested on the example of the German specific EC sehnsucht, and the target culture is such a collective notion as “English-speaking cultures”, since there is no such concept in the English-speaking environment. Based on the definition analysis of the name of the EC sehnsucht – the lexeme Sehnsucht – its closest correspondences in English – longing, yearning, pining, craving, desire and wistfulness – have been identified. The disclosure of all semantic facets of the EC sehnsucht made it possible to “weed out” the ECs wistfulness, desire, craving and pining as those that demonstrate a lower level of equivalence compared to longing and yearning, which are the closest to sehnsucht in terms of content. The analysis of the frequency indices of conceptual proximates of the ECs sehnsucht, longing and yearning has revealed that in the pairs sehnsucht – longing and sehnsucht – yearning the similarity of semantic structures is 70 %, which indicates a rather high level of equivalence of these pairs. The comparison of the average values of the evaluation and intensity indicators of these three ECs revealed that longing and yearning represent more positive emotional experiences than sehnsucht. Mostly it concerns the EC yearning, which is both more positive and more intense. Therefore, it is longing that can be considered the EC in the English-speaking cultures and within their representatives that can evoke the most adequate idea of the emotional experience represented by the German EC sehnsucht.

SUMMARYChildren of 6, 11 and 13 years were interviewed regarding their concept of emotion. Questions were posed about the cues and the accuracy with which emotion may be identified, the strategies by which both the display and the experience of emotion may be regulated, and the effects of emotion on other psychological processes The replies indicate a marked shift in the child's concept of emotion between 6 and 11 years, but no marked changes thereafter. The youngest children focus on publicly observable components of emotion–the eliciting situation and overt behavioural reactions—while the two older groups also consider the hidden mental aspect of emotion. This changing conception of emotion manifests itself in the children's replies to questions concerning the identification, the regulation and the effects of emotion.

Many experiments have found that emotional experience affects self-focused attention. Several approaches to cognition and emotion predict that conscious emotional experience may be unnecessary for this effect. To test this hypothesis, two experiments primed emotion concepts without affecting emotional experience. In Experiment 1, subliminal exposure to sad faces (relative to happy faces and neutral faces) increased self-focused attention but not subjectively experienced affect. In Experiment 2, a scrambled-sentences task that primed happy and sad emotion concepts increased self-focused attention relative to a neutral task. Thus, simply activating knowledge about emotions was sufficient to increase self-focused attention. The discussion considers implications for research on how emotional states affect self-awareness.

Feeling Down: Idiom or Nature?

The study of emotional concepts stands at a very interesting intersection between the theoretical debate about the nature of emotions and the debate about the nature of processing concrete concepts and abstract concepts. On the one hand, it is debated whether it is possible to differentiate basic emotions from secondary emotions and, on the other hand, whether emotional concepts differ from abstract concepts. In this regard, the prototypical perceptual aspects are considered an important factor both for the differentiation between concrete and abstract concepts and for the differentiation between basic and secondary emotions (facial expressions). Thus, the objective has been to determine if (a) the presence or absence of a prototypical perceptual referent, and (b) the type of concept (referring to emotion and not referring to emotion), produce differences between concepts of basic emotions, secondary emotions and concepts not related to emotions, concrete and abstract, in the tasks of qualification of concreteness, imageability and availability of context and the task of the list of properties, that have been used in previous studies. A total of 86 university students from the suburbs of La Serena - Coquimbo (Chile), all native Spanish speakers, participated in the study. The results show that in the perception of concreteness and in the total of enumerated properties, emotional concepts presented similar results to abstract concepts not related to emotion and there was no difference between basic and secondary emotion concepts. In imageability and context availability, emotional concepts were perceived as different from and more concrete than abstract concepts. In addition, the cause-effect type attributes allowed to clearly differentiate emotional concepts from those not related to emotion and to differentiate between basic and secondary emotion concepts. These types of attributes appear almost exclusively in emotional concepts and are more frequent in basic emotions. These results are partially consistent with the predictions of Neurocultural and Conceptual Act theories about emotions.

This essay is the second in a series of works on the phenomenology of emotion. The first1 dealt with the emotion of anger; this time I shall be phenomenologically analyzing the emotion of sadness. Because my analysis is part of an ongoing project on the phenomenology of emotion, it is concerned not only with sadness itself, but also with what a phenomenology of sadness can tell us about emotions in general. I will be utilizing two performances of Shakespeare's play The Tragedy of Hamlet as my research material. The structure of this essay will be as follows: I begin with a brief exposition of my methodology and the theoretical background out of which the project emerges. Then I present my phenomenological descriptions themselves. Interspersed with the phenomenological descriptions will be theoretical reflections about sadness and emotions in general which come out of the descriptions. I conclude with a summary of what we have learned and what work remains to be done. This project is based within the phenomenological philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and can be seen as a continuation of the project he commenced: the re-discovery and articulation of our original, mute, bodily contact with the world. As Merleau-Ponty attempts to show in his seminal work Phenomenologie de la Perception, our body is not a mere mechanism in the service of the mind, but a body-subject which inhabits the world and plays a role in constituting it. Through phenomenological examples and analyses of psychological experiments, he reveals beneath the operations of positing thought an intentionality at work in our body's ongoing involvement in the world. This bodily intentionality forms the substratum which underlies all our objectively posited thoughts and acts and makes them possible. It constitutes the background awareness of the world out of which objects emerge through specific acts of cognition. But unlike the non-conscious operations posited by computationalist theories of mind, which merely reproduce a thinking subject beneath the threshold of consciousness (and therefore presuppose what they intend to explain), this bodily intentionality functions in a different way from the rules and representations of rational thought. It is vague and inarticulate; objects are not fully grasped or disclosed, but rather admit of degrees of indeterminacy.2 We witness it in the motor intentionality evident in the practice of bodily skills3 and in the spontaneous organization of the perceptual field.4 And we also witness it in the peculiar meaning-making proper to emotion, as we shall see. Before we can proceed to the phenomenological analysis proper, it will be necessary to clarify a bit better our subject material. Unlike anger, which appears comparatively straightforward (at least at first glance) sadness is part of a spectrum of emotion words with associated meanings: unhappiness, grief, gloom, melancholy, sorrow, depression, despair. Are these words synonymous with sadness or do they name states which are only related to sadness? Is sadness an umbrella term and all these others grades or permutations of sadness? There is no definitive answerto these questions because words are defined by usage and our usage of these terms is not consistent. Some of us may use the words sad and melancholy to refer to the same state, while others may not. Thus the answers that we give are to some extent arbitrary. And yet we must start somewhere. Therefore I shall take sadness in the widest possible sense to refer to any of the states designated by the terms above. By so doing, I hope to avoid excluding any relevant phenomena. Then, should the phenomena suggest that there are in fact different conditions that sometimes go by the name of sadness, I shall attempt to differentiate them and determine which of the above labels is most appropriate to each one. These conceptual distinctions can themselves be used as signposts for subsequent phenomenological analysis. …

We rely on emotion concepts, an important subset of our conceptual space, to distinguish between a wide array of internal states. A sizable body of work debating the manner in which this space is divided-as well as an array of studies reporting the influence of emotions on attention, decision making, language comprehension, and other cognitive processes- demonstrate that interest in this area is active. However, the underlying structure of emotion concepts has received considerably less attention. Theories of conceptual knowledge have traditionally prioritized the examination of concrete concepts pertaining to inanimate objects and natural kinds (e.g., plants, birds, vehicles). As a result, accounts of the conceptual representation of emotions have almost exclusively focused on their abstract nature. In contrast, in the present study we hypothesized that differences between the experience of emotions and the experience of other abstract concepts (e.g. equality, tyranny), specifically regarding the relative importance of interoceptive states, might drive distinctions in the dimensions along which emotion concepts are represented. Participants performed a property generation task in which they listed features of emotion concepts and a matching number of concrete and abstract, non-emotion concepts. Features were coded into categories derived from the literature. Analysis revealed a statistically significant difference in the distribution of features among the category types by condition (i.e., emotion, abstract, and concrete). Our results reflect subtle differences between the structure of emotion concepts and the structure of, not only concrete concepts, but also other abstract concepts. These findings contribute to our understanding of emotional conceptual representations and their role in cognition and memory.