Situating phenomenological reflections on nostalgia within a historical context, I argue that Kant's temporalization of nostalgia remains incomplete. Bringing into question the widespread assumption that the object of nostalgia must be the past, I argue that nostalgia can be spoken of in three fundamental ways: as nostalgia for the past, for the present, and for the future. I further clarify the relation

We propose a cognitive and neurobiological model by which curiosity regulates affective memory, by positively biasing memory encoding through the promotion of emotion regulation. We begin with a brief overview of curiosity's observed emotional effects. Then we introduce three prominent models of affective memory encoding to suggest that the dopaminergic modulation of encoding associated with curiosity

We raise issues about the philosophical claims made in this article regarding the nature of nostalgia. Drawing on psychological research, we contend that nostalgia is rooted in memory rather than time, is directed toward specific objects rather than being object-free, is predominantly positive rather than a form of mourning, and is focused on the past rather than the present or future.

This paper discusses (i) the usefulness and (ii) the clarity of the concept of arousal. In discussing its usefulness, I argue that we can explain some key “arousal effects” without relying on the concept of arousal. To do so, I consider the role of the appraisal of affective relevance as a process mainly subserved by the amygdala and explaining emotional effects on attention, memory, and learning.

The idea of arousal as a non-specific state of activation has been implicated as an explanatory factor for many aspects of human behavior, ranging from emotional experiences to learning and memory. Critiques of this concept have highlighted that arousal is ambiguous and evidence for its role in emotion is mixed. However, contemporary emotion theories and empirical research continue to incorporate the

Given its clinical significance, horror should occupy a prominent place within emotion theory. However, conceptualizations of horror within psychological science are relatively underdeveloped and conceptually confused. Through conceptual analysis of the disparate literature on the emotion, we seek to establish horror as a qualitatively distinct mode of engagement with the world and to remedy its o

Extant evidence suggests that the two self-conscious emotions pride and guilt guide people's behavior in the context of self-control dilemmas. Pride and guilt are both outcomes of and antecedents to how people resolve self-control dilemmas. However, evidence on how pride and guilt motivate individuals to exert self-control is inconsistent. Based on the Expectancy Value Theory, we propose a conceptual

Participation in, and attendance at, court often positions people amid a charged emotional environment, where the evidence frequently involves distressing accounts and the stakes of decision-making are high. Research has explored the impact of this environment on various court protagonists. What this research has failed to consider in detail, however, are the ways in which such vectors of emotional

Co-speech hand gestures offer a rich avenue for research into studying emotion communication because they serve as both prominent expressive bodily cues and an integral part of language. Despite such a strategic relevance, gesture-speech integration and interaction have received less research focus on its emotional function compared to its cognitive function. This review aims to shed light on the current

In a recent special section on Sustainability and Emotion, Schneider and van der Linden present how sustainability science could benefit from affective science to address important unanswered questions about the psychological and affective antecedents of people's engagement in relatively high-impact sustainable behaviors. Here, we underline the importance of combining the motivational role of positive

Twenty years ago, Öhman and Mineka's publication “The Malicious Serpent” emphasized the selective pressure ancestral reptiles would have on early mammals’ visual system, specifically the development of a set of subcortical structures that would provide snake-like images privileged access to the amygdala. This process would occur automatically and allows for quick defensive reactions. Based on criticisms

This article defines a possible pragmatist approach to the sociology of emotions by discussing and delimiting the concept of “affective rupture.” According to this approach, emotions emerge from the breaking of habits in the face of the transformation of situations, producing reflexivity and relational adjustments. The pragmatist approach problematizes the “rhythm” of emotions, made up of ruptures

The question of why music evolved has been contemplated and debated for centuries across multiple disciplines. While many theories have been posited, they still do not fully answer the question of why humans began making music. Adding to the effort to solve this mystery, we propose the socio-affective fiction (SAF) hypothesis. Humans have a unique biological need for emotion regulation strengthening

Older adults report high emotional well-being, but age-comparative studies of emotion regulation strategies have not identified systematic age differences. We propose that emotion regulation tactics may be more promising. Emotion regulation tactics involve strategy implementation in a specific situation, and have features shared across strategies involving positive or negative elements (objects/thoughts)

There is a long tradition in philosophy and literary theory defending the view that engagement with literature promotes readers’ empathy. Until the last century, few of the empirical claims adduced in that tradition were investigated experimentally. Recent work in psychology and neuropsychology has now shed new light on the interplay of empathy and literature. This article surveys the experimental

Attribution of mental states is fundamental to our engagement with fiction. Crucially, its social content depends on mental states recursively “embedded” within each other; for instance, when a person doesn’t want other people to know about her intentions. Given that some characters seem to be consistently capable of embedding mental states on a higher level than others, this essay reviews factors

This introduces the special issue “Literature and Emotion.”

The “affective turn” is by now long established, part of a wider surge of interest in emotion playing out in a range of disciplines. In literary studies, the conversation about how affect theory might help us to interpret literature is still emerging. The goal of the present discussion is to provide a critical overview of work by scholars who draw on the insights of recent theory to read literary texts

Literature and Moral Feeling argued that ethics is best understood as a constraint on egocentric self-interest. That constraint is specified variously by groups or individuals who set parameters differently within common ethical principles, and who use a range of emotion-guided narrative genres to imagine and evaluate possible actions. Though it covers many ethical concerns (collectively termed “morality”)

Stories, in pictorial format, orally narrated, and later on as narrative texts, have played a key role in human evolution and to this day continue to surreptitiously teach us things and skills. In recent decades, psychologists and cognitive scientists have begun documenting the role of stories, and particularly fiction, in refining our sociocognitive skills. In this essay, I focus specifically on how

We propose that emotion psychology would significantly gain from including narrative(s) and the conversational negotiation of appropriateness. Using the example of anger, we argue that narrators need to construct plausible narratives of emotional events to achieve validating responses by listeners. We argue first that narrators attempt to demonstrate that the appraisal conditions for their emotion

Appraisal theory assumes that the individual variability of emotional reactions to the same situation is due to individual differences in appraisal. However, the question of how interindividual dif...

We posit a model of emotion and nonverbal behavior (NVB) that incorporates a perspective of consciousness. We leverage an understanding of the neural pathways innervating NVB to describe the comple...

Frameworks of emotional development have tended to focus on how environmental factors shape children's emotion understanding. However, individual experiences of emotion represent a complex interpla...

In the past decades, affective science has overwhelmingly demonstrated the unique properties of affective information to bias our attention, memory, and decisions. At the same time, accumulating ev...

The implications of variation in skin pigmentation for the blush have attracted discussion for centuries. Two long-standing positions are identified. First, the blush has been identified with shame...

Research shows the experience of awe is associated with a variety of benefits ranging from increased well-being and prosocial behavior to enhanced cognition. The adaptive purpose of awe, however, i...

Disgust seems to play an important role in moral judgment. However, it is unclear whether the role of disgust in moral judgment is limited to certain kinds of moral domains (versus many) and/or cer...

The enjoyment and pleasure derived from sad music has sparked fascination among researchers due to its seemingly paradoxical nature in producing positive affect. Research is yet to develop a compre...

Sympathy (empathic concern) is mainly understood as a feeling for another and is often contrasted with empathy—a feeling with another. However, it is not clear what feeling for another means and wh...

Although there is evidence parent–child attachment security is associated with trait-like emotion indices, trait perspectives do not fully capture children's responses to context, an important emot...

This special section of Emotion Review is devoted to the discussion of a recent philosophical emotion theory, the theory of emotions as affective position-takings (Jean Moritz Müller, The World-Dir...

This article clarifies and defends my view of emotional feeling in response to the commentaries by Ronnie de Sousa, Rick Furtak, Agnes Moors, Kevin Mulligan, Rainer Reisenzein and Philipp Schmidt. ...

Müller's position-taking view of emotions takes issue with the widely endorsed philosophical notion that emotional feelings are a form of consciousness in which we become acquainted with the evalua...

Müller proposes a position-taking theory to account for the manifest image of emotional feelings as “feelings towards”. He reduces the process of position-taking to goal-based construal, which is a...

The theory of emotions as affective position-takings (PT) is investigated from the perspective of a computational model of the belief-desire theory of emotions (CBDTE) proposed by the author. Both ...

Stress-related psychopathology is on the rise, and there is a pressing need for improved prevention strategies. Positive appraisal style, the tendency to appraise potentially threatening situations...

Happiness is an increasingly prominent topic of interest across academia. However, relatively little attention has been paid to how it is created, especially not in a multidimensional sense. By ‘cr...

Proponents of situated affectivity hold that “tools for feeling” are just as characteristic of the human condition as are “tools for thinking” or tools for carpentry. An agent’s affective life, the...

The three commentaries on “Why We Should Reject the Restrictive Isomorphic Matching (RIM) Definition of Empathy” mostly concurred with our critique of that widely adopted definition of empathy. Yet...

I strongly agree with the criticisms of the restrictive isomorphic matching (RIM) definition of empathy made by Murphy, Lilienfeld, and Algoe (2022), and largely agree with their conceptualization ...

Empathy is a construct that is notoriously difficult to define. Murphy and colleagues argue for leaning into the construct's inherent fuzziness and reverting to what they term a classical definition informed by the observations of philosophers and clinicians: as a dynamic, “unfolding process of imaginatively experiencing the subjective consciousness of another person, sensing, understanding, and structuring

The undoing hypothesis proposes that positive emotions serve to undo sympathetic arousal related to negative emotions and stress. However, a recent qualitative review challenged the undoing effect by presenting conflicting results. To address this issue quantitatively, we conducted a meta-analytic review of 16 studies (N = 1,220; 72 effect sizes) measuring sympathetic recovery during elicited positive

The phenomenological understanding of empathy as the direct experiencing of the mental states (feelings, intentions, moods) of others eschews the identification of empathy with caring. At the same time, it leaves open the possibility of sadistic pleasure, indifference, or malice as consequences of empathic experience.In this paper, I intend to defend the place of caring as an inseparable part of the

This paper proposes and develops the feelings of goals hypothesis (FGH). It has two aims: first, to describe the evolutionary function of emotional feelings (EFs), and second, to describe the content and the format of EFs. According to FGH, the evolutionary function of EFs is to enable motoric flexibility. Specifically, EFs are a component of a psychological mechanism that permits differential motoric

This paper develops the claim that epistemic feelings are affective experiences. To establish some diagnostic criteria, characteristic features of affective experiences are outlined: valence and arousal. Then, in order to pave the way for showing that epistemic feelings have said features, an initial challenge coming from introspection is addressed. Next, the paper turns to empirical findings showing

A growing cadre of influential scholars has converged on a circumscribed definition of empathy as restricted only to feeling the same emotion that one perceives another is feeling. We argue that this restrictive isomorphic matching (RIM) definition is deeply problematic because (1) it deviates dramatically from traditional conceptualizations of empathy and unmoors the construct from generations of

The aim of this article is to explore how some aspects of Gilbert Simondon's philosophy of individuation may contribute to outlining a posthumanist theory of emotions. According to Simondon, the relation between affection and emotion is a key case study for examining the transindividual character of psychosocial individuation. Affection and emotion appear to him not as a binary opposition, but as an

The question “what is emotion?” has long been at the core of theoretical debates. The IAC-E is a useful framework for understanding relationships among responses in emotional situations. However, this approach cannot address the nature of emotion. Researchers determine what counts as emotion in the IAC-E, and this decision impacts the relationships detected and inferences made. The assumptions of researchers

To make progress related to long-standing questions related to the nature of emotion, we offer the Interactive Activation and Competition framework for Emotion (IAC-E). The IAC-E is not another conventional theory of emotion. Rather, it offers a neural-network-based, algorithmic account of how emotion instances and categories arise. Our approach suggests that there need not be a contradiction between

Suri and Gross's 2022 connectionist emotion theory can be considered as one version of a family of theories known as network theories of emotion. It presents similarities and differences with older versions of network theories. Like previous network theories and several other traditional emotion theories, however, the connectionist theory remains a reactive theory. The class of reactive theories can

Müller's account of the way episodic emotions function depends on a contrast between these and what he calls cares, concerns and attachments and the claim that the latter are in several respects prior to the former. The account seems to attribute no normative features to the latter. But this is implausible. If a preference for liberty over social justice is a concern, it is justified if liberty really

The role emotions play in the dynamics of cultural phenomena has long been neglected. The collection of articles recently published in Emotion Review provides an important first step into this necessary endeavor. In this commentary, we discuss this contribution by emphasizing the role epistemological parsimony should play in the future of this research agenda. The cultural behavior and emotions of

This article is a précis of my 2019 monograph The World-Directedness of Emotional Feeling: On Affect and Intentionality. The book engages with a growing trend of philosophical thinking according to which the felt dimension and the intentionality of emotion are unified. While sympathetic to the general approach, I argue for a reconceptualization of the form of intentionality that emotional feelings

According to Jean Moritz Müller's The world-directedness of emotional feeling, the reason why emotions do not apprehend or disclose value is that one cannot apprehend what one has already apprehended: the value in question, he claims, is apprehended prior to the emotional feeling. Emotions, then, should not be conceived as apprehending value since they already presuppose awareness of it. I can be acquainted

Müller argues that the perceptual or “Axiological Receptivity” (AR) model of emotions is incoherent, because it requires an emotion to apprehend and respond to its formal object at the same time. He defends a contrasting view of emotions as “Position-Takings" (PT) towards “formal objects”, aspects of an emotion's target pertinent to the subject's concerns. I first cast doubt on the cogency of Müller's

Researchers often disagree as to whether emotions are largely consistent across people and over time, or whether they are variable. They also disagree as to whether emotions are initiated by appraisals, or whether they may be initiated in diverse ways. We draw upon Parallel-Distributed-Processing to offer an algorithmic account in which features of an emotion instance are bi-directionally connected

Autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity is a fundamental component of emotional responding. It is not clear, however, whether positive emotional states are associated with differential ANS reactivity. To address this issue, we conducted a meta-analytic review of 120 articles (686 effect sizes, total N = 6,546), measuring ANS activity during 11 elicited positive emotions, namely amusement, attachment

This article reviews literature in composition studies since affective science's emergence in the 1980s. It focuses on composition studies’ history of adopting findings and theories from affective science, and distinguishes trends in how the field applies those elements in theoretical versus pedagogical contexts. While composition studies’ adoption of affective science in its theorizing has helped