Reading is not only “cold” information processing, but involves affective and aesthetic processes that go far beyond what current models of word recognition, sentence processing, or text comprehension can explain. To investigate such “hot” reading processes, standardized instruments that quantify both psycholinguistic and emotional variables at the sublexical, lexical, inter-, and supralexical levels (e.g., phonological iconicity, word valence, arousal-span, or passage suspense) are necessary. One such instrument, the Berlin Affective Word List (BAWL) has been used in over 50 published studies (...) demonstrating effects of lexical emotional variables on all relevant processing levels (experiential, behavioral, neuronal). In this paper, we first present new data from several BAWL studies. Together, these studies examine various views on affective effects in reading arising from dimensional (e.g., valence ) and discrete emotion features (e.g., happiness ), or embodied cognition features like smelling. Second, we extend our investigation of the complex issue of affective word processing to words characterized by a mixture of affects. These words entail positive and negative valence, and/or features making them beautiful or ugly. Finally, we discuss tentative neurocognitive models of affective word processing in the light of the present results, raising new issues for future studies. (shrink)

I critically analyze Kagan’s claim that in order to advance the science of emotion we should abandon the practice of referring to emotions with common folk psychological names, such as fear and anger. Kagan recommends discovering more homogenous constructs that are segregated by the type of evidence used to infer those constructs. He also argues that variable origins, biological implementations, and psychological and sociocultural contexts may combine to create distinct kinds of emotional states that require distinct names. I acknowledge that (...) such a splitting strategy will provide increased validity, but also claim that atomizing alone may not give us everything we want from a scientific classification. (shrink)

An alternative approach to emotion is presented here, which differs from that of Kagan and others. It orders emotion along a continuum of the embodiment of emotion, starting with a clear but rare case of pure emotion and at the other extreme discusses Damasio’s intelligent prefrontal patients who could not feel emotions critical to social life.

The central contention of this article is that the classificatory scheme of contemporary affective science, with its traditional categories of emotion, anger, fear, and so on, is no longer suitable to the needs of affective science. Unlike psychological constructionists, who have urged the transition from a discrete to a dimensional approach in the study of affective phenomena, I argue that we can stick to a discrete approach as long as we accept that traditional emotion categories will have to be transformed (...) in order to do any scientific work. I conclude by articulating some general rules for turning traditional emotion categories into suitable scientific tools. (shrink)

A commentary on Robert Kagan’s What is Emotion? (2007). The commentary praises the author for the range and breadth of his analysis and for his skepticism concerning the common tendency to equate emotions with brain states. At the same time, I raise questions about the terms in which Kagan attempts to separate out the distinct components of the emotional “cascade.” In particular, I suggest that by treating the appraisal or interpretation of the changes in bodily feelings as a distinct phase (...) of the emotional response, Kagan appears to dissociate the relevant brain and bodily feeling states from the contexts or meanings in which they are embedded, and to do so in ways that obscure the relationship between the successive components or phases he has identified. (shrink)