There is growing evidence that language plays an important role in emotion because it helps people acquire emotion concept knowledge. In this chapter, we argue that language plays a mechanistic role in emotion because emotion concept knowledge, once acquired, is used by the brain to predictively and adaptively regulate a person’s subjective emotional experiences and behaviors. Building on predictive processing models of brain function, we argue that the emotion concepts learned via language during early development “seed” the brain’s emotional predictions throughout the lifespan. We review constructionist theories of emotion and their support in behavioral, physiological, neuroimaging, and lesion data. We then situate these constructionist predictions within recent neuroscience research to speculate on the neural mechanisms by which emotion concepts “seed” emotional experiences.

Psychiatric disorders are highly comorbid and are not separated by sharp biological boundaries. Understanding the common mechanisms that explain symptom overlap in mental disorders is therefore clearly needed. Here, we briefly review impaired emotional processing and emotional dysregulation in affective disorders, with a special focus on unipolar depression. Affective disorders are characterized by abnormal emotion intensity, changes in the temporal dynamics of emotion and difficulties to influence the trajectory of emotions. Disruptions in emotion processing and emotional regulation are underlined at the neural level by abnormal interactions between cortical and limbic structures in terms of increased variance in functional connectivity. Emotional processes are also tightly linked to cognitive processes, which constitute main targets for therapeutic interventions in affective disorders.

Decades of research demonstrate cultural variation in different aspects of emotion, including the focus of emotion, expressive values and norms, and experiential ideals and values. These studies have focused primarily on Western and East Asian cultural comparisons, although recent work has included Latinx samples. In this chapter, we discuss why studying culture is important for studies of emotion and what neuroscientific methods can contribute to our understanding of culture and emotion. We then describe research that uses neuroscientific methods to explore both cultural differences and similarities in emotion. Finally, we discuss current challenges and outstanding questions for future research.

This chapter introduces peripheral physiological measures of emotion as important tools for studying emotion in affective neuroscience. It examines responses across three systems: skeletal muscle activity, autonomic nervous system (cardiovascular and electrodermal), and respiration. It surveys measurement modalities, derived metrics, their neural control, timescales of expected response, and prominent findings in recent literature, linking them to central nervous system activity throughout. The chapter concludes by highlighting outstanding questions and future challenges in the field of peripheral physiological measures of emotion.

Emotionally or motivationally significant stimuli tend to attract, divert, or hold attention more readily than neutral stimuli. These effects arise during numerous tasks, varying as a function of stimulus type or emotional cue. Their neural substrates involve enhanced activity of sensory cortices under direct influence of emotional or reward processing systems, including the amygdala, in combination with other top-down or bottom-up biases that together serve to prioritize behaviorally relevant information for access to conscious awareness. Other indirect influences act through interactions of emotional and motivational systems, with cortical or subcortical networks controlling attention, including executive functions and neuromodulatory pathways. These data reveal that attentional processes encompass multiple biasing signals that can modulate stimulus processing, based not only on space or object representations, as traditionally considered, but also value-based representations. Such mechanisms of emotional attention or affect-driven biases may operate preattentively, involuntarily, or non-consciously, yet nonetheless be regulated by current goals or context.

Over the last thirty years, affective neuroscience has become a royal road to our understanding of emotion and other affective phenomena, being both a core discipline of the affective sciences, and an engine for the rise of affectivism. After a brief discussion of the role of human affective neuroscience in affectivism, the chapter addresses some terminological and taxonomy-related issues before suggesting a consensual definition of emotion. Next, five major families of theories of emotions are presented in relation to five components of emotion. This review illustrates the fact that different families of theories typically focus on different components – even if each family also often considers some of the other components to a lesser extent. Whereas expression is central to basic emotion theory, action tendencies are central to motivational theories, autonomic reaction is central to bodily/interoceptive theories, feeling is central to constructionist theories, and the role of cognition in emotion-elicitation is central to appraisal theories.

This chapter focuses on Cicero’s treatment of the emotions in Books 3 and 4, and more specifically on his account of the dispute between the Stoics and the Peripatetics. At first sight, the dispute seems uncomplicated: the Stoics advocate the complete absence of emotions whereas the Peripatetics hold that emotions should rather be moderated or controlled. But Cicero’s stress on the idea that emotions are beliefs seems to come at the expense of other central parts of the theory of emotions, most prominently the theory of action.  I argue that these features of his presentation serve him in securing a thesis that he is keen to defend in Book 5: that virtue guarantees happiness and that this happiness is invulnerable to the accidents of fortune.

This chapter considers more platform-specific forms, exploiting possibilities such as the ready integration of emoji on X/Twitter or the integration with audio and video on TikTok. We focus on the expression of emotional meanings and stance, and also pay attention to the co-construction of memetic discourse by multiple discourse participants in online exchanges. Overall, we suggest that the easy transfer across platforms and modes reveals a kind of memetic mindset in which discourse takes shape online, even where this does not necessarily involve fully formed or identifiable memes in a strict sense.

Values permeate every aspect of our lives, shaping individual actions and giving meaning, direction and scope to our work environments and organisational cultures. Defining positive behaviours and identifying unprofessional, disrespectful or negative behaviours shape and define every aspect of our work and personal lives. Values also have an emotional component: when we act in accordance with our values, we experience positive emotions; conversely, when we act against our values or are placed in situations that compromise our values, we experience emotional dissonance. It is this emotional component that drives us to seek values alignment in our personal and professional lives.

To be compassionate is to care about others specifically in opposition to their suffering or deficiency. While the distress of compassion is paradigmatic of the virtue, a wide range of emotion types – gratitude, anger, fear, joy, and so forth – can express it. Aristotle offers an analysis of the emotion of compassion as entailing propositions (1) that the other is suffering, (2) that the other doesn’t deserve the suffering, and (3) that oneself is vulnerable to the kind of suffering one sees in the other. In dialogue with Martha Nussbaum’s exposition and adaptation of Aristotle’s analysis of the emotion of compassion, this chapter compares Aristotelian compassion with the compassion that is commended in the New Testament. Differences between the two turn on differences in the concept of suffering, in the presence of a concept of forgiveness, and in the locus of commonality.

How are virtues constituted psychologically? The virtues of caring or substantive virtues are dispositional concerns for the good in its various aspects: the well-being of people and other animals, the avoidance or relief of their suffering, the reconciliation of enemies, knowledge and truth, justice, proper formation of sensual desire and pleasure, and one’s duties. Generosity, compassion, forgivingness, justice, and the sense of duty are examples of virtues constituted by such caring. Because the caring is virtuous only if directed to real goods, the concerns need to be shaped by correct thought (understanding). The virtues of caring divide into direct (for example, generosity) and indirect (for example, justice). Another class of virtues – the enkratic – are powers, abilities, or skills of self-management. These, too, require understanding – of self and how to manage it in the various situations and influences of life. Examples are self-control, courage, patience, and perseverance.

Chapter 2 explores the developmental psychology of metaphor and its significance for illness experience. While semiotics of medicine implies a simple link between physiological processes and symptom reports, illness experience is articulated through metaphors that are grounded in bodily experience, social interaction, discourse, and cultural practices. Bodily grounding of metaphor is based on sensorimotor equivalences, as seen early in development in synesthesia and cross-modal analogies. Social grounding resides in the pragmatics of language in which context and goals depend on social roles, norms, and cultural meaning. Despite this, metaphors allow for creative play by requiring only piecemeal correspondences to the world through ostension. The meaning of metaphors is then found not in representation but in presentation. Clinical examples illustrate a patient on dialysis refusing a blood transfusion and a woman with medically unexplained floating sensations, showing how a semantics of metaphor can clarify the tensions between the essential irrationality of illness experience and the biomedical presumption of rationality in normative accounts of illness cognition and behavior.