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Updated: Aug 30, 2025

Exploring the Use of Isolated Expressions and Film Clips to Evaluate Emotion Recognition by People with Traumatic Brain Injury
Published on: May 15, 2016
What Do People Think Is an Emotion?
Rodrigo Díaz1,2
1Centre for Research in Ethics, University of Montreal, Montreal, Canada.
Abstract:
In emotion research, both conceptual analyses and empirical studies commonly rely on emotion reports. But what do people mean when they say that they are angry, afraid, joyful, etc.? Building on extant theories of emotion, this paper presents four new studies (including a preregistered replication) measuring the weight of cognitive evaluations, bodily changes, and action tendencies in people's use of emotion concepts. The results of these studies suggest that the presence or absence of cognitive evaluations has the largest impact on people's emotion attributions, and bodily changes and action tendencies are considered to depend on cognitive evaluations. Implications for theories of emotion (concepts) and the interpretation of emotion reports are discussed.
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