Research

Our working hypothesis is that words for emotion correspond to mental states that can be described as the combination of more basic psychological processes. Psychological constructionist models of emotion, as they are called, made an early appearance in the psychological literature, although they are relatively rare in the history of psychology. Constructivist approaches to emotion are united in the assumption that the mental events called "anger," "sadness," and "fear" are not basic building blocks in the mind, but instead are mental events that result from the interplay of more basic psychological systems that are not themselves specific to emotion. In much the same way, flour, water, and yeast can be combined in various recipes to make various types of food that look and taste very different from one another.

In our constructivist approach, called the conceptual act model, an emotion word like "anger" names a commonsense category that corresponds to a range of mental events which emerge from the interaction of more basic psychological ingredients, or what we call core psychological systems. Unlike older constructivist approaches that viewed emotions as special mental events arising from unexplained or ambiguous physical arousal that is only later interpreted or cognitively elaborated after the fact, the conceptual act model makes reference to several core systems (core affect, conceptualization, executive control) that are always in play and continually shaping one another as they combine like ingredients to make a variety of mental states -- only some of which people call "emotion."

The conceptual act model prescribes a broad, innovative scientific agenda for the study of emotion that is grounded, first and foremost, in a better understanding of these three core systems and their interaction, with an emphasis on individual differences or variability. In addition, it suggests several counter-intuitive hypotheses about the fundamental role of affect in consciousness, and the role of language in perception and experience. In the final analysis, our research attempts to provide two answers to the question "what is emotion" -- one psychological and the other neuroscientific. The two answers, if they reference and respect each other, will provide a general framework for how the mind can be mapped to the brain.