In the past decade, spontaneous and dynamic facial expression databases (FEDBs) have expanded rapidly, advancing emotion research beyond static, posed expressions. Yet existing reviews remain fragmented due to limited search strategies and a lack of systematic methods. This article synthesizes 128 spontaneous and dynamic FEDBs, examining their conceptual, technical, and practical dimensions. It summarizes how emotions are represented, measured, and validated across diverse populations; how databases vary in composition, recording methods, and modalities; and how accessibility, usability, and ethics shape their use. By integrating these perspectives, the review consolidates current knowledge, identifies methodological gaps, and outlines directions for developing more diverse and ecologically valid FEDBs that better capture the complexity of human emotion.
Social sharing of emotion (SSE) is widespread, yet digital contexts may selectively foreground certain traditional motives and alter how they are expressed. This paper proposes an integrative model explaining how traditional SSE motives are enacted, prioritized, and organized on social media. Drawing on SSE theory and perspectives on self-presentation, hyperpersonal communication, social presence, and media richness, the model distinguishes antecedent factors that activate sharing from structural conditions that shape how sharing unfolds and is interpreted. Heightened visibility, indeterminate audiences, and anonymity selectively foreground five digitally salient SSE motives, taking the form of identity signaling, risk-managed disclosure, networked problem-solving, validation seeking, and visibility mobilization. These forms are conceptualized as context-specific expressions of traditional SSE motives rather than novel psychological needs, preserving theoretical continuity while capturing how these motives are differentially prioritized and expressed on social media.
Agnes Moors challenges William James’s theory of emotions on multiple grounds. She argues that: James wrongly commits to the view that emotions must have perceptual causes; he wrongly insists that all emotions are embodied, ignoring emotions such as hope and regret; he errs in treating bodily feeling as sufficient for emotions; he cannot account for the “heat” (valence and intensity) of emotions; and he fails to account for emotions’ intentionality. This commentary addresses each of these objections, while also agreeing with Moors that James’s theory needs to be updated. An imperatival theory of emotions is proposed and compared to Moors’ response evaluation theory.
Since 1990, research on emotional intelligence (EI) has generated both controversy and promise. Yet little is known about its early conceptual history. This article addresses that shortcoming by tracing the origins and evolution of EI through literature, arts, philosophy, and early social science, outlining how diverse references gradually coalesced into a recognizable construct. We identify “proto-EI” instantiations—precursors that resonate with today's “four-branch” model—and trace how they developed across domains, culminating in a more focused scholarly interest in the late 20th century. Our contribution is threefold: (a) documenting imprints of EI and proto-EI, (b) clarifying the trajectory of EI as a concept rather than an essence, and (c) opening avenues for future research by highlighting forgotten dimensions and interdisciplinary and intercultural possibilities.
This reply engages with five commentaries on my target article advancing the goal-directed theory (GDT). Stussi et al. expand the discussion by emphasizing epistemic goals, whereas Scarantino, Bonard, Pacherie, and Prinz resist my eliminativist conclusion to varying degrees by raising objections in the form of counterexamples (e.g., decisional paralysis, emotional recalcitrance, responding with vs. without emotional heath) and other puzzles (e.g., identity-based irrational emotions). By clarifying several misunderstandings about the GDT (e.g., about the revisability, automaticity, and complexity of goal-directed processes), I show how the theory can accommodate these objections, thereby further strengthening its viability.
This article analyzes the emotions of alienation, estrangement, and nostalgia, and how they are central to the production of neo-emotions in contemporary society. Alienation is a product of the macro-social context of capitalist societies and contemporary neo-emotions are a response to this, addressing the current misalignment between people, their emotional experiences, and their dynamic environment. I consider how alienation affects those on the left of politics, including those involved in radical activism, and how neo-emotions are the creative practices that forge new identities and collectives for active resistance. Those struggling to create non-alienated societies always experienced conflicting emotions, like optimism and pessimism, hope and despair, but these can be synthesized into positive neo-emotions such as progressive nostalgia and radical hope.
Black Americans are disproportionately exposed to police violence, medical racism, and workforce discrimination in comparison to their White counterparts. Controlling images that position Black people as emotionless criminals, over-emotional, and subjects who feel pain differently have been used to justify these racial disparities. This paper explores how Black Americans articulate complicated emotions produced by living in the United States as a citizen while American institutions are simultaneously organized around anti-Black racism. Black Americans have expanded their emotional vocabulary and developed feeling some type of way as a neo-emotion that abandons a search for accurate description by relying on emotional opacity and feelings that don't register as feelings to refuse the terms that equate emotional knowability with one's access to humanity.
Neo-emotions are defined by one shared characteristic: they are a response to macro-societal changes. To gain full insight into when neo-emotions occur, a sociological approach needs to be complemented with a psychological perspective to conceptualize the relation between micro- and macro-level processes. I argue that neo-emotions can be considered group-based emotions. Their social function is to regulate potential challenges elicited by societal changes which one's bonds with members of one's group. Neo-emotions increase belongingness to a group and demarcate one's own group from other groups. In addition to strengthening one's social identity, neo-emotions have a societal function to strengthen social movements, providing awareness, commitment, and change. An adequate emotion vocabulary supports these functions but is not a necessary condition for neo-emotions to emerge.
This paper reconceptualises evaluative processes pertinent to empathy as empathic perception: an evaluative, dynamic, and embodied process that provides morally neutral information as a perception to guide action and manage relationships. Traditional models often treat empathy as prosocial, yet it can enable both cooperation and exploitation. Empathic perception addresses this complexity by reframing evaluative processes used to understand another as a means of gathering intelligence rather than as an inherently benevolent force. Drawing on psychology, neuroscience, and social theory, we develop a model of empathic perception and an empathic perception-action matrix that shows how sociocultural context and personal motivation shape outcomes. This reconceptualization advances theoretical understanding by positioning empathic enquiry not as a moral virtue, but as a perceptual process that informs decision-making across contexts.
This paper identifies and characterizes a commonplace but philosophically neglected aspect of human emotional experience, which I call emotional self-dissonance. I start from the position that emotional experiences generally involve taking things to matter in ways that reflect what we already care about. Building on this, I suggest that our various projects, pastimes, commitments, relationships, and habits together comprise an evaluative orientation through which we experience things emotionally. Although this orientation is for the most part cohesively organized, tensions within it are inevitable. I suggest that emotions of familiar kinds often incorporate a sense of these tensions. In addition, emotional self-dissonance can amount to a form of emotional experience in its own right, one that encompasses considerable variety.
Hatred is widely condemned as an unambiguous evil, yet this paper asks whether it might also serve constructive functions. Drawing on philosophical, psychological, and evolutionary perspectives, we argue that hate evolved as an adaptive response to threats of domination and to challenges to shared meaning systems posed by individuals or groups. Hate fulfills this role by motivating action, sustaining focus, fostering coalitional cohesion, providing meaning, and operating as a power-based emotion that can mobilize the subordinated. We then illustrate how hate has been used in revolutionary social movements. While acknowledging its dangers, we contend that dismissing hate as purely toxic overlooks its possible role in signaling injustice and galvanizing resistance. The challenge is understanding when hatred cures rather than poisons.
I defend the adequacy of the goal-directed theory (GDT) of emotion. After outlining the properties of emotions (mental and bodily aspects, valence, intensity, urgency, automaticity, and irrationality) and common emotion types that emotion theories seek to explain, I contrast the GDT with traditional emotion theories, portraying the former as proactive and the latter as reactive. The GDT proposes that most behavior and feelings, emotional or otherwise, arise from multiple competing, hierarchical goal-directed cycles, each involving discrepancy detection and strategy/behavior selection. I systematically assess the GDT's ability to account for these properties and emotion types. Finally, I discuss implications for (a) the scientific status of emotions, (b) their influence on other entities, (c) emotion regulation, and (d) agency and moral responsibility.
Moors' eliminativist theory of emotions aims to show that understanding emotional behavior as goal-directed behavior when the goals are high value explains all that is worth explaining about behavior without invoking the concept of emotion. I argue that eliminating emotions in favor of goal-directed cycles has major explanatory costs, because emotional behavior differs in important ways from behavior governed by cost-benefit analysis. I compare and contrast Moors' theory with my own Motivational Theory of Emotions (MTE) with respect to two explanatory challenges in particular-emotion-induced decisional paralysis and recalcitrance. I conclude that we cannot make sense of these affective phenomena in purely goal-directed terms, and that a stimulus-driven process of behavior causation such as the one posited by MTE is required for explanatory purposes.
Agnes Moors' claim that the processes underlying emotional behavior and those driving non-emotional instrumental behavior are predominantly goal-directed leads her to the eliminativist conclusion that there is no solid mechanistic distinction between emotional and non-emotional episodes-and, thus, that emotions do not qualify as scientifically fruitful concepts. Here, I introduce a distinction between two types of goal-directed processes and discuss the sense of value that I consider relevant to emotional goals. On that basis, I reexamine whether the path to eliminativism is actually unescapable.
This article introduces identity-based irrationality, a form of emotional irrationality that arises when the evaluations eliciting an emotion conflict with a person's deep, identity-constituting beliefs and desires. While the goal-directed theory (GDT) of emotions accounts for apparent (Type-1) and theoretical (Type-2) irrationality, it does not capture cases where emotions are structurally inconsistent with the agent's deep self. Drawing on theories of the deep self, identity-based irrationality is characterized as a conflict between circumstantial evaluative hierarchies operative in the moment and more enduring identity hierarchies that organize the person's commitments. Through illustrative cases, the paper argues that this form of irrationality is neither merely apparent nor grounded in erroneous representations of the situation, but instead reflects an evaluative structural irrationality. It concludes by assessing three ways the GDT might accommodate such conflicts and argues that incorporating identity-level structure is necessary for a complete account of emotional irrationality.
Adopting componential and appraisal approaches to emotion, this commentary highlights how Moors' goal-directed theory allows a deep analysis of the role of emotion in information-seeking decisions. We illustrate how (i) the opportunity to gain information can signal discrepancies with multiple goals, which are reduced by seeking or avoiding information, (ii) goalrelated appraisals and goal satisfaction may partly account for the rewarding properties of information, (iii) practical rationality can explain seemingly irrational information-seeking behaviors, and (iv) biased goal priorization and appraisal biases could lead to maladaptive information-seeking. We suggest that appraisal and goal-directed theories may complement current theoretical frameworks of information-seeking by providing a mechanistic approach to understanding how the evaluation and selection of goals, behavioral strategies, and actions influence information-seeking.
In the Component Process Model (CPM), emotion is defined as a rapid psychological process whose emergence relies on appraisals (i.e., cognitive evaluations) of the environment. Personality encompasses many affective components and traits thought to shape specific appraisals, which in turn drive subsequent emotional outcomes. Despite the relevance of this relationship, it has mostly been studied within stress research. Therefore, this article aims at: (1) synthesizing prior research on the relationship between personality and appraisal, using the Big Five personality trait taxonomy as an integrative model and the alternative appraisal tradition of the CPM, and (2) providing an explanatory perspective on the nature of such relationships. The importance of understanding the mechanism linking individual differences and emotion responses is discussed.
There is a growing interdisciplinary effort to understand the emotional dimensions of the climate crisis. A central focus in this line of research is ecological grief-the grief felt in relation to ecological losses. Ecological grief is frequently claimed to be a shared emotion. Here, we discuss whether, and in which way, ecological grief is a shared emotion. We argue that ecological grief is characteristically shared as a group-based emotion. The shared character of ecological grief comes down to the shared nature of place-based practices and place-based identity, and this is reflected in the intentional structure of ecological grief, which is about our possibilities that have been lost through the loss of place. Ecological grief is also, we argue, apt to take the form of a shared process due to the often ambiguous and ongoing nature of ecological losses.
Neo-emotions are invented terms that express emotional experiences that are novel or that have not previously been labeled. This article considers the utility of the concept of neo-emotions for the study of the past, exploring concepts of novelty and historical change within the history of emotions; the limits of emotion words for the study of emotional life; and the ways that neo-emotions point to the place of creativity and play in the development of new emotions. It suggests that the prominence of neo-emotions in the 21st century reflects current philosophical and scientific ideas about how emotions operate, which do not apply in all societies. Despite this, the concept of neo-emotions requires historians to look again at past emotional practices and the place of play in the development of new emotions.
