Abstract

What are emotion concepts? The answer to this question is the topic of the present chapter. We begin with the observation that people possess the concepts of “joy,” “sadness,” and “fear,” among others, as indicated by their language use and their behavior (e.g. Russell, Lewicka, and Nitt, 1989). They also recognize perceptual input from other people, such as their faces and bodies, as meaning that those people feel “joy” and “sadness” and “fear.” This chapter is about the representation of emotion concepts. What allows individuals to judge a face as expressing “disgust,” and what happens when they identify the word “cruel” in a text?