Feeling The Right Way: Normative influences on people’s use of emotion concepts

Diaz Martin, Rodrigo Jesús; Reuter, Kevin (2020). Feeling The Right Way: Normative influences on people’s use of emotion concepts. Mind & language, 36(3), pp. 451-470. Wiley-Blackwell 10.1111/mila.12279

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It is generally assumed that emotion concepts merely encode descriptive information about agents’ psychological or bodily states. Recent investigations have challenged this assumption, claiming that the folk concept of happiness also includes information about the moral status of the agent’s life. In this paper, we argue and present new empirical results suggesting that the influence of normative considerations on emotion concepts is not restricted to happiness and is not about moral norms. According to our “Fittingness Model”, when people attribute emotions like happiness or fear, they not only look for certain psychological and bodily states, but also take into account whether these states fit the situation in which they are experienced. For example, being afraid would not only be about feeling agitated but feeling agitated about something dangerous. People consider that emotions are not just about feeling in certain ways, but also about feeling the right way.

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