Emotion research typically searches for consistency and specificity in physiological activity across instances of an emotion category, such as anger or fear, yet studies to date have observed more variation than expected. In the present study, we adopt an alternative approach, searching inductively for structure within variation, both within and across participants. Following a novel, physiologically-triggered experience sampling procedure, participants’ self-reports and peripheral physiological activity were recorded when substantial changes in cardiac activity occurred in the absence of movement. Unsupervised clustering analyses revealed variability in the number and nature of patterns of physiological activity that recurred within individuals, as well as in the affect ratings and emotion labels associated with each pattern. There were also broad patterns that recurred across individuals. These findings support a constructionist account of emotion which, drawing on Darwin, proposes that emotion categories are populations of variable instances tied to situation-specific needs.

Expertise refers to outstanding skill or ability in a particular domain. In the domain of emotion, expertise refers to the observation that some people are better at a range of competencies related to understanding and experiencing emotions, and these competencies may help them lead healthier lives. These individual differences are represented by multiple constructs including emotional awareness, emotional clarity, emotional complexity, emotional granularity, and emotional intelligence. These constructs derive from different theoretical perspectives, highlight different competencies, and are operationalized and measured in different ways. The full set of relationships between these constructs has not yet been considered, hindering scientific progress and the translation of findings to aid mental and physical well-being. In this article, we use a scoping review procedure to integrate these constructs within a shared conceptual space. Scoping reviews provide a principled means of synthesizing large and diverse literature in a transparent fashion, enabling the identification of similarities as well as gaps and inconsistencies across constructs. Using domain-general accounts of expertise as a guide, we build a unifying framework for expertise in emotion and apply this to constructs that describe how people understand and experience their own emotions. Our approach offers opportunities to identify potential mechanisms of expertise in emotion, encouraging future research on those mechanisms and on educational or clinical interventions.

Students possess informal, intuitive ways of reasoning about the world, including biological phenomena. Although useful in some cases, intuitive reasoning can also lead to the development of scientifically inaccurate ideas that conflict with central concepts taught in formal biology education settings, including evolution.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.