In this contribution, I interrogate the historical-intellectual narrative that dominates the history of the Schachter–Singer two-factor theory of emotion. In the first part, I propose that a social influence model became generalized to a cognitive view. I argue that Schachter and Singer presented a cognitive theory of emotions in enacting inside the laboratory Schachter’s preceding “social influence” model of emotions and that Schachter’s adoption of a cognitive model of emotion was driven by and was necessary for his previous research on (...) social influence. In the second part, I argue that the Schachter–Singer theory is remarkable not because it introduced a cognitive turn in emotion, but because it presented sympathetic nervous system activation as an essential constitutive element of every emotion. (shrink)

A long-standing observation about the interface between emotion and language is that positive words are used more frequently than negative ones, leading to the Pollyanna hypothesis which alleges a predominantly optimistic outlook in humans. This paper uses the largest available collection of affective ratings as well as insights from linguistics to revisit the Pollyanna hypothesis as it relates to two dimensions of emotion: valence (pleasantness) and arousal (intensity). We identified systematic patterns in the distribution of words over a bi-dimensional affective (...) space, which (1) run counter to and supersede most prior accounts, and (2) differ drastically between word types (unique, distinct words in the lexicon) and word tokens (number of occurrences of available words in the lexicon). We argue for two factors that shape affect in language and society: a pro-social benevolent communication strategy with its emphasis on useful and dangerous phenomena, and the structure of human subjective perception of affect. (shrink)