Abstract
The Component Process Model is a well-established framework describing an emotion as a dynamic process with five highly interrelated components: cognitive appraisal, expression, motivation, physiology and feeling. Yet, few empirical studies have systematically investigated discrete emotions through this full multi-componential view. We therefore elicited various emotions during movie watching and measured their manifestations across these components. Our goal was to investigate the relationship between physiological measures and the theoretically defined components, as well as to determine whether discrete emotions could be predicted from the multicomponent response patterns. By deploying a data-driven computational approach based on multivariate pattern classification, our results suggest that physiological features are encoded within each component, supporting the hypothesis of a synchronized recruitment during an emotion episode. Overall, while emotion prediction was higher when classifiers were trained with all five components, a model without physiology features did not significantly reduce the performance. The findings therefore support a description of emotion as a multicomponent process, in which emotion recognition requires the integration of all the components. However, they also indicate that physiologyper seis the least significant predictor for emotion classification among these five components.
Highlights
Emotions play a central role in human experience by changing the way we think and behave
Our initial exploratory analyses intended to examine whether physiological data can be predicted using the CoreGRID items, and vice versa
Multivariate pattern classification analyses generated results better than chance level to predict (1) changes in physiological measures from the 32 CoreGRID items, (2) ratings of the majority of CoreGRID items from physiological measures, and (3) discrete emotion labels that refer to conscious feelings experienced by the participants and presumably emerge from a combination of physiological and behavioral parameters
Summary
Emotions play a central role in human experience by changing the way we think and behave. There is a consensus at least in defining an emotion as a multicomponent response, rather than a unitary entity (Moors, 2009). This conceptualization concerning the componential nature of emotion is central in appraisal theories (Scherer, 2009) and constructivist theories (Barrett et al, 2007), and found to some extent in dimensional (Russell, 2009) and basic categorical models. Synchronized changes in all these components—appraisal, motivation, physiology, and motor expression—may be centrally integrated in a multimodal representation (see Figure 1) that eventually becomes conscious and constitutes the subjective feeling component of the emotion (Grandjean et al, 2008)
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