What is a positive emotion?: The psychological construction of pleasant fear and unpleasant happiness.

摘要: In this chapter, we consider atypical emotions—categories of negative emotion, such as fear, which feel pleasant, and categories of positive emotion, such as happiness, which feel unpleasant—and focus on the consequences for the study of positive emotion. We first describe our theoretical approach, the conceptual act theory, which emphasizes that variety exists within emotion categories. This model defines emotions as psychological constructions that emerge from the categorization of ongoing affective variations of arousal and valence in the body and brain. Next, we discuss the cognitive science literature on concepts and categorization, and explore the notion of I typicality. We then discuss a novel approach to concepts called" situated conceptualization," which is based on grounded cognition and employed by the Conceptual Act Theory to understand emotion. We then present recent empirical research that …