Emotion, core affect, and psychological construction

Abstract

As an alternative to using the concepts of emotion, fear, anger, and the like as scientific tools, this article advocates an approach based on the concepts of core affect and psychological construction, expanding the domain of inquiry beyond “emotion”. Core affect is a neurophysiological state that underlies simply feeling good or bad, drowsy or energised. Psychological construction is not one process but an umbrella term for the various processes that produce: (a) a particular emotional episode's “components” (such as facial movement, vocal tone, peripheral nervous system change, appraisal, attribution, behaviour, subjective experience, and emotion regulation); (b) associations among the components; and (c) the categorisation of the pattern of components as a specific emotion.

Keywords:

• Emotion
• Core affect
• Psychological construction
• Facial expression
• Emotional behaviour

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by NSF grant # 5000590. This article is based on a talk given at the Symposium on Emotions and Individual Differences, Leuven, 30 May to 1 June 2007.

I thank attendees at the symposium and Giovanna Colombetti for their comments on the ideas presented here. I especially thank Kristen Lindquist for an insightful reading of a draft of this article.

Notes

To be clear: when I write of “seeing” anger or another emotion, of “seeing” two lines in the Müller–Lyer figure as of unequal length, or of “seeing” the sun set, I mean to describe what the perception is like for the perceiver. In the realm of the emotions, we see faces move, which they really do, hear the voice change, which it really does, see palms sweat, which they really do, and so on, all in some context. We then name the combination of these events as anger, thereby inferring anger as their cause.

The influence of the concept of emotion is pervasive and subtle. For example, critics of my account (Russell, 2003) have mistakenly assumed that mine is a “dimensional” rather than “categorical” account of emotion, i.e., that the domain of emotion is to be subdivided by dimensions of core affect rather than by discrete categories such as fear and anger. Another false interpretation is that core affect carries the same assumptions that emotion does, i.e., that core affect must account for facial and vocal expressions, autonomic changes, emotional behaviour and the like.

Core affect does provide the pleasant or unpleasant hedonic tone to those token emotional events that have that tone. Core affect is also a central feature of the mental prototypes of some emotions but not a necessary feature of all cases of those emotions. For example, cases of fear can be found without a core affect of unpleasant arousal, but they are mediocre or borderline rather than prototypical cases. (Fear without arousal: contemplating a distant danger; fear without displeasure: thrill seeking.) Charland (2005) underscored the distinction between core affect and emotion by observing that, on Panksepp's theory, some emotions (lust, seeking) can, depending on context, involve very different values of core affect prototypically. Of course, the concepts of emotion, fear, and so on, could be redefined for scientific purposes such that core affect is a necessary feature, but I'm not advocating that route.