To determine what an emotion is, is a matter of conceptualization~namely, understanding and explicitly encoding the concept of emotion as people use it in everyday life. This is a notoriously difficult problem (Frijda, 1986; Fehr Russell, 1984). The purpose of this paper is to give a formal representation of the concept of emotion. The view underlying our approach is that primitive concepts are...

In so far as a man amounts to anything, stands for anything, is truly an individual, he has an ego about which his passions cluster. .. We are virtually always in a state of pride or shame. T he centrality of emotion and self to social life is almost axiomatic in the psychological literature. What is less accepted, or at least less frequently discussed, is the essential interconnection between ...

The debate surrounding how emotion and cognition are organized in the brain has recently been drawn toward Damasio’s Somatic Marker Hypothesis. The theory endorses a highly interactive process that emotion has with cognition, but has been criticized for: 1) being too broad to capture the specific processes that emotion offers cognition, and 2) implicitly endorsing that emotion operates from a s...

This study investigated the brain regions for the comprehension of implied emotion in sentences. Participants read negative sentences without negative words, for example, "The boy fell asleep and never woke up again," and their neutral counterparts "The boy stood up and grabbed his bag." This kind of negative sentence allows us to examine implied emotion derived at the sentence level, without a...

Individuals with bipolar disorder experience emotion regulation difficulties, even during remission, but are able to effectively employ emotion regulation strategies when instructed. We hypothesized that this puzzling discrepancy might be due to their maladaptive emotion regulation choices. To test this hypothesis, we used a previously validated paradigm (Sheppes, Scheibe, Suri, & Gross, 2011; ...

For decades, psychologists and neuroscientists have hypothesized that the ability to perceive emotions on others' faces is inborn, prelinguistic, and universal. Concept knowledge about emotion has been assumed to be epiphenomenal to emotion perception. In this article, we report findings from 3 patients with semantic dementia that cannot be explained by this "basic emotion" view. These patients...

Individuals with bipolar disorder experience emotion regulation difficulties, even during remission, but are able to effectively employ emotion regulation strategies when instructed. We hypothesized that this puzzling discrepancy might be due to their maladaptive emotion regulation choices. To test this hypothesis, we used a previously validated paradigm (Sheppes, Scheibe, Suri, & Gross, 2011; ...

The Karolinska Directed Emotional Faces (KDEF) is one of the most widely used human facial expressions database. Almost a decade after the original validation study (Goeleven et al., 2008), we present subjective rating norms for a sub-set of 210 pictures which depict 70 models (half female) each displaying an angry, happy and neutral facial expressions. Our main goals were to provide an additio...

With a few yet increasing number of exceptions, the cognitive sciences enthusiastically endorsed the idea that there are basic facial expressions of emotions that are created by specific configurations of facial muscles. We review evidence that suggests an inherent role for context in emotion perception. Context does not merely change emotion perception at the edges; it leads to radical categor...

Cognitive self-regulation can strongly modulate pain and emotion. However, it is unclear whether self-regulation primarily influences primary nociceptive and affective processes or evaluative ones. In this study, participants engaged in self-regulation to increase or decrease pain while experiencing multiple levels of painful heat during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) imaging. Bot...