Author Reply: We Don’t Yet Know What Emotions Are (But Need to Develop the Methods to Find Out)

Abstract

Our approach to emotion emphasized three key ingredients. (a) We do not yet have a mature science of emotion, or even a consensus view—in this respect we are more hesitant than Sander, Grandjean, and Scherer (henceforth “SGS”) or Luiz Pessoa (henceforth “LP”). Relatedly, a science of emotion needs to be highly interdisciplinary, including ecology, psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. (b) We recommend a functionalist view that brackets conscious experiences and that essentially treats emotions as latent variables inferred from a number of measures. (c) But our version of functionalism is not definitional or ontological. It is resolutely methodological, in good part because it is too early to attempt definitions.