People continually and automatically evaluate situations and objects for their relevance and value …
The evidence suggests the real possibility that there are no emotion mechanisms in the brain waiting to be discovered, producing a priori packets of outcomes in the body. Emotions may not be given to humans by nature …
If the clearest evidence for the distinctiveness of anger, sadness, and fear is in perception, then perhaps these categories exist in the perceiver. Specifically, I hypothesize that the experience of feeling an emotion, or the experience of seeing emotion in another person, occurs when conceptual knowledge about emotion is used to categorize a momentary state of core affect…
Categorizing is a fundamental cognitive activity. To categorize something is to render it meaningful; it is to determine what something is, why it is, and what to do with it. Then, it becomes possible to make reasonable inferences about that thing, predict how to best to act on it, and communicate it to others. In the construction of emotion, the act of categorizing core affect performs a kind of figure-ground segregation (Barsalou, 1999, 2003), so that the experience of an emotion will stand out as a separate event from the ebb and flow of an ongoing core affect…
The conceptual act model suggests an intrinsic role for language in perceiving emotions in the behaviors of other people (see Lindquist et al., 2006). It is consistent with the linguistic relativity hypothesis (Whorf, 1956), which states that language forms the basis of experience. In the case of emotion, language shapes core affective phenomena into the emotional reality that people experience. Language not only enters into the categorization process, but it also directs the development of knowledge about emotion categories in the first place. Language guides what nonlinguistic information is included in an emotion category as it is being constructed during the learning process. As a result, the conceptual act model provides a means for understanding the role of language in cultural, as well as in individual, differences in the experience of emotion. …
Emotion categories can be thought of as goal-directed categories that develop to guide action. The most typical member of a goal-directed category is that which maximizes goal achievement…
A number of studies show that knowledge structures that are activated outside of awareness can have a profound influence on people’s subsequent thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. When the concept “old” is activated, college-aged participants walk slower. When the concept “African American” is activated, European American participants act more aggressively (Bargh, Chen, and Burrows, 1996). These effects can be overcome with more controlled processing, but only when sufficient cognitive resources are available.
—Lisa Feldman Barrett
The Science of Emotion:
What People Believe,
What the Evidence Shows, and
Where to Go From Here
Human Behavior in Military Contexts
Committee on Opportunities in Basic Research in the Behavioral and Social Sciences for the U.S. Military
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