Emotion Researcher

To cite this content: Fineman S. (2024), “Getting Critical about Emotion”, Emotion Researcher, ISRE’s Sourcebook for Research on Emotion and Affect, Rebecca Dickason (Ed.), https://emotionresearcher.com/getting-critical-about-emotion/, accessed [add date]. Former Professor and Professor Emeritus of Organizational Behaviour at the School of Management at the University of Bath, UK, Stephen Fineman…

Introduction Grief is an emotional response to loss. But of course, not all emotional response to loss is grief. Most obviously, our emotional responses to minor or insignificant losses are not typically grief. I will begin this contribution by sketching an account of the kind of significance that makes a loss sufficient for grief. Furthermore, what makes a loss significant also explains the rela…

After a relatively long hiatus, we are excited to publish this issue devoted to the connection between emotion and feeling. Although hardly a neglected topic, the nature and role of feeling in emotion remains rather opaque and controversial, as evidenced by all three contributions to this issue. In the first invited article, Ralph Adolphs (California Institute of Technology) addresses the questio…

Living in communities is not easy; to co-exist successfully we must understand and follow certain norms or risk being shunned by our groups. Such norm understanding begins to emerge remarkably early in life1–3. Norms aimed at preserving the rights and welfare of others belong to the moral domain; norms aimed at preserving the social coordination of groups belong to the conventional domain. At aro…

Language is the repository of culture, identity and behavior labels define social situations, and the identities that we enact in them—personally performed but culturally contextualized—motivate our behaviors. Throughout these social interactions, felt emotion serves as a barometer concerning the success or failure of our attempted identity affirmations. In other words, who we are affects how we …

Psychological disorders, especially internalizing disorders like anxiety and depression, cause immense human and economic burden across the globe. Prior work shows that internalizing disorders are characterized by perturbations in emotion regulation (i.e., the strategies people use to change how they feel), with excessive use of maladaptive strategies that reduce short-term distress but maintain …

No, I am not advocating that researchers working on emotion should become cold and unsympathetic people. I am also not arguing that feelings do not accompany emotions, or are irrelevant to emotions. Indeed, I think feelings are important and fascinating phenomena well worth study. I just don’t think it is necessary to study them in a science of emotion. More than that, I think it’s generally a ba…

With the rise of affectivism (Dukes et al., 2021), affective scientists are increasingly investigating the mechanisms that underly emotions and their interactions with cognitive processes such as attention, memory, and decision-making. While intense debates exist in our field, it seems to me that there are also important agreements that have been reached. I argue below that whereas most current t…

The great philosopher David Hume wrote that “Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” [1]: emotion is the force that propels thought and action. To understand Hume’s thesis, think about what happens when a kid asks you “why?” over and over again. Why you wake up in the morning, why go to work every day, why …

Departments of Computer Science, Psychology, and Media Arts and Practice Affect recognition: a useful or dangerous tool? Many assume that a person’s emotional state can be accurately inferred by surface cues such as facial expressions and voice quality, or through physiological signals such as skin conductance or heart rate variability. Indeed, this assumption is reflected in many commercial “aff…

Dear ISRE Members, The president of ISRE usually uses this space to wish everyone a good year and to take the opportunity to highlight activities and initiatives of the society both past and future. This year, we are looking back at a year of upheaval. The past year was a difficult one for all of us and on many different levels. While we all start to feel that there is a light at the end of the t…

The year that was 2020 is finally behind us. And yet the memories of this trying year will be lasting, not least of which because it was such an emotionally turbulent experience. Somewhat fittingly, the collection of invited articles in this issue focus on emotion and memory. In the first invited article, Fabrice Teroni from the University of Geneva provides a philosophical, bidirectional perspec…

An interview with Cain Todd Michael Brady is Professor of Philosophy and Head of School at the University of Glasgow, which he joined in 2005. He was Director of the British Philosophical Association from 2011 until 2014, and Secretary of the Scots Philosophical Association from 2009 until 2012. He is on the Board of The Philosophical Quarterly, and subject editor responsible for Moral Philosophy…

Emotional memories dominate our life histories. How are emotionally-laden events prioritized in the brain and linked to neural systems that promote memory? This question has been at the forefront of affective neuroscience for decades but has received renewed attention as advances in imaging methodology have permitted more detailed accounts of neural interactions that contribute to complex human b…

This issue focuses on the complex issue of the evolution of emotion. How one views the evolutionary history and adaptive functions of emotions will have a profound impact on one’s views about the nature of emotions, about the function of specific emotions, and about the evaluative and normative dimensions of emotional experiences. It is therefore of great importance to construct a multi-disciplin…

Pre-theoretically, it seems obvious that there are deep and multifarious relations between memory and emotions. On the one hand, a large chunk of our affective lives concerns the good and bad events that happened to us, which we preserve in memory. This is one amongst the many ways in which memory is relevant to the nature and causation of emotions. What does recent research teach us about these …

“He who laughs last has not yet heard the bad news.” ― Bertolt Brecht There are many ways to refute a theory. Refutation by joke is the greatest of all. “Two behaviourists have just made love. One asks the other: ‘I know you liked it. Did I like it?’” The starting point of this short essay is another attempted refutation-by-joke. It concerns valence. What? Very simply, to say that an experience h…

Talk about the personal past is ubiquitous; we tell our daily adventures to friends and family over dinner, we share each other’s everyday lives over coffee and over the internet, and we reminisce about our life experiences, big and small, in snatches of conversations and long soliloquies. Importantly, almost all of the experiences we reminisce about have an emotional component. Whether they are …

Introduction The possibility that normative motivations are basic or psychologically primitive is an intriguing one worthy of more attention. On the one hand, there is a powerful case that human minds are equipped with a psychological system dedicated to norms and norm-guided behavior (Setman & Kelly, forthcoming). On the other hand, there has not yet been a convincing case made that there are an…

I am deeply honored to have been elected President of ISRE. ISRE has been my intellectual home as an emotion researcher since I joined in 1992. In those years much has changed with regard to the appreciation of the role of emotions in our lives. In fact, when I started my undergraduate studies in psychology at the University of Giessen, Klaus Scherer, who was my mentor and supervisor in Giessen, …