Are Emotions Enumerable or Decomposable? And its Implications for Emotion Processing

Emotion is a complicated concept, and can be represented in different ways. In this paper, we discuss two kinds of emotion representations: the enumerative representation and the compositional representation. Compared to the enumerative representation, the compositional representation is the less rigid description of an emotion. However, from the perspective of emotion classification and detection, different representations often correspond to different emotion processing task. In the enumerative representation, emotion processing can be considered as single-label classification (detecting one and only one label); in the compositional representation, the task turns into the detection of a vector. In this paper, we explore the impact of these emotion representations in emotion processing, including the trade-off of these representations and the selection of technologies to process