COMMENTARIES on: Why Emotion Names and Experiences Don't Neatly Pair

Abstract

In the target article, Sabini and Silver (this issue) make the important point that emotional words and emotional experiences do not have a one-to-one map ping. In making this assertion, they join a long list of re searchers and theorists including Kagan (1988), Lang (1993) and others who have reached the same conclu sions albeit for quite different reasons. Sabini and Silver assert that there are fewer emotional experiences than there are emotional words. Kagan has claimed essen tially the opposite. Kagan noted that psychologists are wont to use basic emotion labels such as fear to refer to a very wide range of phenomena. To continue with this ex ample, the state experienced by a rodent in response to a simple tone that has been paired with shock is called "fear." That same word is used to describe the state expe rienced by a person as she enters a doctor's office to learn the outcome of a breast biopsy. Although, there may in deed be some superficial resemblance between these states, it is also clear that they differ in important ways that are likely to involve different underlying neurobiological systems. In fact, when direct measures of brain function are examined, such different kinds of fear are associated with different patterns of brain activ ity (see e.g., Davidson & Irwin, 1999 for review), yet psychologists often use the same word to refer to these very different states. Even though reaching the same conclusion as Sabini and Silver, Kagan and others (e.g., Davidson, 1993) believe that there are far fewer emotion words than there are emotion experiences and the use of the same word to refer to very different states that are elicited in vastly different contexts is hazardous and po tentially misleading. Lang's perspective on emotion offers a different view on why emotion words and emotion experiences often diverge. Lang (1993) has suggested that there are three major domains that contribute to emotion-ac tion, physiology, and subjective experience. Within each of these domains, many further distinctions can be made but just among these three domains, Lang and his colleagues have argued that there are imperfect as sociations at best, since each reflects different features of emotion that do not necessarily cohere (Bradley & Lang, 2000; Lang, Levin, Miller, & Kozak, 1983). For instance, Lang et al. (1983) observed the relative inde pendence among verbal report of affect, overt behavior and psychophysiological measures in response to cer tain commonly used methods of emotion induction. Bradley and Lang (2000) report that in response to mild to moderate elicitors of emotion, covariation be tween the response systems explains 15% of the vari