January 23, 2006Personality and Social Psychology Review
Solving the Emotion Paradox: Categorization and the Experience of Emotion
Authors
Discussion
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Implication
Theoretical model reveals that emotional experiences arise from categorizing affective feelings in humans, suggesting emotions are constructed cognitive events rather than discrete entities.
Key Points
- To resolve the emotion paradox wherein people perceive emotions as discrete recognizable events despite science lacking consistent objective criteria for their presence.
- Conducted a conceptual synthesis integrating affective science, cognitive categorization, and social psychology literature.
- Developed a theoretical framework linking raw affective feeling with embodied conceptual knowledge and person perception models.
- Proposes that the subjective experience of emotion occurs when individuals conceptualize an instance of affective feeling through an act of categorization.
- Demonstrates that emotion categorization relies on embodied conceptual knowledge, providing a unified explanatory bridge between social perception and emotional experience.
Cite This Study
Lisa Feldman Barrett (2006) studied this question.