Are All "Basic Emotions" Emotions? A Problem for the (Basic) Emotions Construct.

Despite decades of challenges to the idea that a small number of emotions enjoys the special status of "basic emotions," the idea continues to have considerable influence in psychology and beyond. However, different theorists have proposed substantially different lists of basic emotions, which suggests that there exists no stable criterion of basicness. To some extent, the basic-emotions enterprise is bedeviled by an overreliance on English affective terms, but there also lurks a more serious problem-the lack of agreement as to what emotions are. To address this problem, three necessary conditions are proposed as a minimal requirement for a mental state to be an emotion. A detailed analysis of surprise, a widely accepted basic emotion, reveals that surprise violates even this minimal test, raising the possibility that it and perhaps other would-be basic emotions might not be emotions at all. An approach that combines ideas such as undifferentiated affect and cognitive appraisal is briefly proposed as a way of theorizing about emotions that is less dependent on the vagaries of language and incoherent notions of basic emotions. Finally, it is suggested that the perennial question of what an emotion is should be given more serious attention.

Initial Evidence for the Hypersensitivity Hypothesis: Emotional Intelligence as a Magnifier of Emotional Experience.

In this article, we provide preliminary evidence for the 'hypersensitivity hypothesis', according to which Emotional Intelligence (EI) functions as a magnifier of emotional experience, enhancing the effect of emotion and emotion information on thinking and social perception. Measuring ability EI, and in particular Emotion Understanding, we describe an experiment designed to determine whether, relative to those low in EI, individuals high in EI were more affected by the valence of a scenario describing a target when making an affective social judgment. Employing a sample of individuals from the general population, high EI participants were found to provide more extreme (positive or negative) impressions of the target as a function of the scenario valence: positive information about the target increased high EI participants' positive impressions more than it increased low EI participants' impressions, and negative information increased their negative impressions more. In addition, EI affected the amount of recalled information and this led high EI individuals to intensify their affective ratings of the target. These initial results show that individuals high on EI may be particularly sensitive to emotions and emotion information, and they suggest that this hypersensitivity might account for both the beneficial and detrimental effects of EI documented in the literature. Implications are discussed.

State-Dependent Memory: Neurobiological Advances and Prospects for Translation to Dissociative Amnesia.

In susceptible individuals, overwhelming traumatic stress often results in severe abnormalities of memory processing, manifested either as the uncontrollable emergence of memories (flashbacks) or as an inability to remember events (dissociative amnesia, DA) that are usually, but not necessarily, related to the stressful experience. These memory abnormalities are often the source of debilitating psychopathologies such as anxiety, depression and social dysfunction. The question of why memory for some traumatic experiences is compromised while other comparably traumatic experiences are remembered perfectly well, both within and across individuals, has puzzled clinicians for decades. In this article, we present clinical, cognitive, and neurobiological perspectives on memory research relevant to DA. In particular, we examine the role of state dependent memory (wherein memories are difficult to recall unless the conditions at encoding and recall are similar), and discuss how advances in the neurobiology of state-dependent memory (SDM) gleaned from animal studies might be translated to humans.

Re-examining dominance of categories in impression formation: A test of dual-process models.

We carried out tests of the first 2 premises of the Continuum Model (CM) of impression formation (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990). These premises predict that category information will in general be more influential than noncategory information, and that the fit of noncategorical attributes with the category is a major determinant of the relative influence of these types of information. Using stimuli that included sets of (a) text items only, and (b) combinations of photos and text items, we found no support for these claims, even using alternative tests. In addition, many positive effects found in our analyses run counter to the predictions of the CM. We conclude that either significant portions of dual-process models (also, Brewer, 1988) are not applicable to many previously claimed scenarios of impression formation, or that although pieces of them may be roughly accurate, reasonable questions arise as to their predictive and discriminant validity. (PsycINFO Database Record

Psychological Construction in the OCC Model of Emotion.

This article presents six ideas about the construction of emotion: (a) Emotions are more readily distinguished by the situations they signify than by patterns of bodily responses; (b) emotions emerge from, rather than cause, emotional thoughts, feelings, and expressions; (c) the impact of emotions is constrained by the nature of the situations they represent; (d) in the OCC account (the model proposed by Ortony, Clore, and Collins in 1988), appraisals are psychological aspects of situations that distinguish one emotion from another, rather than triggers that elicit emotions; (e) analyses of the affective lexicon indicate that emotion words refer to internal mental states focused on affect; (f) the modularity of emotion, long sought in biology and behavior, exists as mental schemas for interpreting human experience in story, song, drama, and conversation.

Using modified incremental chart parsing to ascribe intentions to animated geometric figures.

People spontaneously ascribe intentions on the basis of observed behavior, and research shows that they do this even with simple geometric figures moving in a plane. The latter fact suggests that 2-D animations isolate critical information--object movement--that people use to infer the possible intentions (if any) underlying observed behavior. This article describes an approach to using motion information to model the ascription of intentions to simple figures. Incremental chart parsing is a technique developed in natural-language processing that builds up an understanding as text comes in one word at a time. We modified this technique to develop a system that uses spatiotemporal constraints about simple figures and their observed movements in order to propose candidate intentions or nonagentive causes. Candidates are identified via partial parses using a library of rules, and confidence scores are assigned so that candidates can be ranked. As observations come in, the system revises its candidates and updates the confidence scores. We describe a pilot study demonstrating that people generally perceive a simple animation in a manner consistent with the model.