Glossary // Glossary term Theoretical
Emotion
A relatively brief, coordinated response to a situation that is appraised as relevant to a person's goals, involving subjective experience, physiological change and tendencies toward expression and action. Theories disagree about whether a small set of basic emotions has distinct, universal signatures or whether emotion categories are constructed from more general processes and vary across instances and contexts. Research reviewed on this site finds considerable variability in facial and autonomic responses within the same emotion category. A short history of the concept of catharsis from Aristotle's Poetics through Breuer and Freud's cathartic method to empirical research on emotional expression, with the working definition used by this project. Affective computing promises to infer emotion as if it were a system metric. The evidence on facial movements and autonomic signals, together with questions of consent, explains why every metric in this artifact is an artistic value. The works the definition rests on, with the level of evidence each was appraised at. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. doi:10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.271 Supports definitions and the five-point process model used across the library. A conceptual framework, not a test of which strategies work. (2019). Emotional expressions reconsidered: Challenges to inferring emotion from human facial movements. doi:10.1177/1529100619832930 Supports the claim that facial configurations are not reliable, specific indicators of emotional states across cultures, situations and people, although they co-occur above chance. A narrative review by authors associated with one theoretical position; critics dispute parts of it. (2018). Emotion fingerprints or emotion populations? A meta-analytic investigation of autonomic features of emotion categories. doi:10.1037/bul0000128 Supports the claim that autonomic effect-size patterns did not clearly distinguish one emotion category from another and varied substantially within categories. Laboratory inductions; the interpretation favours one theory of emotion.Where the site uses it
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