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Are emotions judgments, feelings, or both?

Elif Yıldız Fellow
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Emotions#appraisal#emotion
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In my emotion psychology course we covered three families of theories:

  • feeling theories, like the James–Lange theory (1880s): an emotion is our perception of bodily changes, so we're afraid because we tremble, not the other way round
  • cognitive or judgment theories, like Martha Nussbaum's in Upheavals of Thought (2001), which follow the Stoics: emotions are evaluative judgments about things we care about
  • constructionist theories, like Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made (2017): emotions are constructed by the brain from bodily signals and learned concepts

Each seems to capture something. Feeling theories can't explain why emotions are about things; judgment theories can't explain why I can fear a harmless spider while believing it's harmless. Is there a good synthesis?

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4 answers

  1. Elin Hedqvist

    Fellow

    The spider case is exactly what the Stoic "first movements" are for. The jolt isn't the full emotion yet; the emotion comes if I assent to the judgment that something terrible is happening. So the Stoics already had a two-stage theory.

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  2. Giulia Ferrante

    Fellow

    Nussbaum herself addresses the spider-type cases, I believe, by allowing that an emotion can rest on a judgment that persists at some level even when we reject it intellectually. Whether that is coherent is another matter.

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  3. Priya Raghavan

    Fellow

    Perception theories (Jesse Prinz's, for example) try to synthesise: emotions are perceptions of bodily changes that represent things like danger or loss. So they're bodily and also about something, the way seeing is.

    1. Elif Yıldız

      Fellow

      Priya, that synthesis is appealing. It explains the spider case: perception can be wrong while belief is right, like a visual illusion that persists after you know it's an illusion.

      Helpful · 1