Please note this is the pre-publication manuscript to the article that has been published in the BPS Psych-Talk magazine (also the formatting is not quite right but I’m not sure how to format it properly on here):

Evangelou, G. (2019). How much do we really know about the science of emotion and happiness?. BPS Psych-Talk, 93, 3-4.

Link: https://shop.bps.org.uk/publications/publication-by-series/psych-talk/psychtalk-issue-93-may-2019.html

How much do we really know about the science of emotion and happiness?

Emotion

In terms of what an emotion is and the reasons/functions of it is largely debated, from the Darwinian perspective right across to the social constructivist. This debate may even remain so until the end of time and can be left to philosophers. Science is there to identify the properties and effects of phenomena, and under what conditions they are caused by (Edelman & Tononi, 2013). There are discrepancies about the universality of Ekman’s basic emotional expressions, and emotional language (i.e. fear, anger) due to untranslatable words which leaves this also still up for debate. What science has managed to do is reduce emotion to its raw state via natural semantic metalanguage (Wierzbicka, 2009), attempting to define cognitive scenarios through universal human concepts. Additionally, what can be objectively identified as emotion is an affective system (Blanchette & Richards, 2010) in which we subjectively experience positive and negative states. These states interact with and influence cognition, including higher level cognitive processes such as reasoning, judgement and decision making.

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