Variety is the spice of life: A psychological construction approach to understanding variability in emotion

Abstract

There is remarkable variety in emotional life. Not all mental states referred to by the same word (e.g., “fear”) look alike, feel alike, or have the same neurophysiological signature. Variability has been observed within individuals over time, across individuals from the same culture, and of course across cultures. In this paper, I outline an approach to understanding the richness and diversity of emotional life. This model, called the conceptual act model, is not only well suited to explaining individual differences in the frequency and quality of emotion, but it also suggests the counter-intuitive view that the variety in emotional life extends past the boundaries of events that are conventionally called “emotion” to other classes of psychological events that people call by different names, such as “cognitions”. As a result, the conceptual act model is a unifying account of the broad variety of mental states that constitute the human mind.

Keywords:

• Affect
• Categorization
• Construction
• Perception

Acknowledgements

Preparation of this paper was supported by an National Institutes of Health Director's Pioneer Award (DP1OD003312), grants from the National Institute of Aging (AG030311) and the National Science Foundation (BCS 0721260; BCS 0527440), and a contract with the Army Research Institute (W91WAW), as well as by a James McKeen Cattell Award and a Sabbatical Fellowship from the American Philosophical Society to Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Notes

¹Valenstein's observation might seem surprising at first, but it is consistent with emerging neuroscience evidence that neurons do not code for a single property in a functionally specific way. For example, a recent study with rats demonstrates that there is a functional r e-mapping of cells in the nucleus accumbens (part of the ventral striatum)—sometimes they code for reward and other times for threat, depending on the degree of negativity in the context (Reynolds & Berridge, 2008). The information signalled by a neuron also depends, in part, on the assembly of neurons that serve as the context in which it is firing, so that individual neurons respond to different type of sensory cues when participating in different neural assemblies, even in primary sensory areas where receptive fields for neurons are supposed to be well defined (as in primary visual cortex or V1; Basole, White, Fitzpatrick, 2003).

²People may not agree with one another as much as is assumed (Russell, 1994), and some people clearly have more trouble than do others (Barrett, 1998, 2004; Feldman, 1995).

³Affect is not always experienced as your reaction to the world. At times, affect is experienced as a property of objects so that conscious percepts are intrinsically infused with affective content. This is why a drink tastes good or is unappetising (e.g., Winkielman, Berridge, & Wilbarger, 2005), why we experience some people as nice, and others as mean; why some foods tastes good but others are distasteful; and why some paintings are beautiful while others are ugly. It is under these circumstances when core affect is experienced as a property of the world that it is called “unconscious”. When core affect is foregrounded in consciousness it is experienced as your reaction to the world: you like or dislike a drink, a person, or a painting. Or foregrounded affect can be experienced as emotion.

⁴The metaphor of a recipe works for describing any emergent phenomenon, such as the interplay of genes and epigenetic factors that together produce observed phenotypic behaviours (Bateson, 1976).

⁵Even if better methods or experiments finally allow scientists to discover that all responses within an emotion category such as “anger” are relatively homogeneous, and that the variability observed within each category is largely due to error of one form or another, this does not, in and of itself, provide unequivocal support for the existence of basic emotion categories in the traditional sense. All individuals within a certain cultural group can produce a remarkably consistent challah as long as a sufficient number of egg yolks are added to the bread batter. Similarly, bread is a category of food that can be found in many different cultural groups of human beings (even though pita tastes very different from nan, both of which are different from a really good rye bread). Nonetheless, bread is an observer-dependent category that is made from a substance (grain) that was, at a certain point in human history, a form money, and that can be used to make other kinds of substances like alcohol. The point is that if the recipe is strong and clear, if there is transmission consistency, and also transmission advantage, learning combined with a psychological constructionist approach could also produce homogeneities. Emotional homogeneities could, in principle exist as emergent phenomena without emotional essences.