Emotion

Sauter, D. A. (2018). Is there a role for language in emotion perception? Emotion Review, 10, 111–115. doi:10.1177/1754073917693924

What is the relationship between language, emotion concepts, and perceptual categories? Here I compare the strong Whorfian view of linguistic relativity, which argues that language plays a necessary role in the perception of emotions, to the alternative view that different levels of processing (e.g., linguistic, conceptual, perceptual) are relatively independent and thus, that language does not play a foundational role in emotion perception. I examine neuropsychological studies that have tested strong claims of linguistic relativity, and discuss research on categorical perception of emotional expressions, where the two accounts have been directly tested against each other. As in other perceptual domains, there is little evidence that language plays a foundational role in the perception of emotion.

Emotion and Actions: Causality?

Scarantino, A. (2017). Do Emotions Cause Actions, and If So How? Emotion Review, 9(4), 326–334. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073916679005

In this article, I evaluate and ultimately reject these two influential arguments, concluding that neither the timing of the occurrence of, respectively, emotions and actions nor the imperfect association between them warrant the conclusion that emotions do not cause actions. While defending this view, I begin to sketch what sort of causal relation exists between emotions and actions, although most of the pesky details will have to be left for future work.