The Cognitive Structure of Emotions

"Emotions have many facets. They involve feelings and experience, they involve physiology and behavior, and they involve cognitions and conceptualizations. There are important questions that can be asked about the expression of emotions (e.g., Fernâandez-Dols & Russell, 2017; Keltner et al., 2019), and the language of emotion constitutes an interesting research domain in its own right (e.g., Lindquist et al., 2015; Wierzbicka, 1999). But in this book, although we will surely have quite a bit to say about, especially, the relation between language and emotions, our main concern will be with the contribution that cognition makes to emotion. In particular, we will focus on the role of the system of cognitive representations--the value system--that leads people to appraise the situations in which they find themselves as good or bad, as beneficial or harmful, or, more generally, as positive or negative, that is, valenced. The value system, which we take to be comprised of three classes of cognitive representations--(the current state of) a person's goals, standards, and tastes--is central to the theory that we propose. Broadly speaking, goals (i.e., representations of desired states of the world) are"--