Can Feelings “Feel” Wrong? Similarities Between Counter-Normative Emotion Reports and Perceptual Errors

Givon, Ella; Udelsman-Danieli, Gal; Almagor, Ophir; Fekete, Tomer; Shriki, Oren; Meiran, Nachshon

doi:10.1177/09567976211063915

Cited by 7 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 27 publications

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“…Likewise, when we become aware of our emotions, our consciousness apparatus collects neural evidence from the interoceptive apparatus, from our sensation of action tendencies, from cognitions, and so forth. As shown here, and following other works from our group (Givon et al, 2020, 2022; Singer-Landau & Meiran, 2021), this evidence accumulation process is very well described by the LBA and, as shown here, roughly equally so for “usual” perception and for emotional feelings.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

“…For modeling purposes, we defined correct and wrong emotion reports according to adherence to norms, an assumption justified by the fact that aberrant emotion reports have been shown to be processed similarly to aberrant perceptual decisions—that is, errors (Givon et al, 2022), most importantly in terms of aberrant RT distributions being relatively more right skewed but also in terms of speed-accuracy trade-off, post-error slowing, and electroencephalogram error-related negativity. We estimated the LBA parameters for each individual, using Bayesian hierarchical modeling (ggdmc R package; Lin & Strickland, 2020).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…And most importantly, reports of emotional feelings and comparable (in terms of RT and accuracy) perceptual decisions are explained equally successfully by the same models: signal detection theory (Macmillan & Creelman, 2004) and evidence accumulation models, that is, the linear ballistic accumulator model (LBA; Brown & Heathcote, 2008; see Givon et al, 2020; Karmon-Presser et al, 2018). Counter-normative emotion reports resemble perceptual-decision errors in terms of their RT distribution, their influence on performance in the next trial, and their sensitivity to speed-accuracy instructions (Givon et al, 2022). In the following sections, we describe Weber’s law, which might provide additional and much stronger support for the perceptual theory.…”

Section: Weber’s Lawmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 2 more Smart Citations

Pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws (weber’s law) as most sensations do.

Berkovich¹,

Meiran²

2023

Emotion

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Emotion episodes may include a conscious aspect of the emotion, namely being aware of our own emotional experience. Despite explosion in research over previous years, it remains unclear how emotions reach awareness and become feelings. Already in 1884, William James argued that emotional feelings resemble ordinary sensations in this respect. Here, using a novel model-based ratio scale of emotion intensity, we provide one of the strongest pieces of evidence supporting James' perceptual theory by showing that emotion awareness obeys one of the most fundamental laws of perception, Weber's law. According to this law, stimulus encoding accuracy decreases with intensity. In this work, we asked participants to provide binary pleasant-versus-unpleasant reports of their experience when watching normed emotion-eliciting pictures (NAPS;Marchewka et al., 2014). The results validate our model's measure of emotion intensity by showing its monotonous relation to picture norms. Most importantly, they show, for the first time, that in humans, pleasant emotion experiences follow Weber's classical psychophysical law-indicating decreased encoding precision with increasing pleasantness. This result supports James' theory, suggesting that (pleasant) emotions reach awareness just as ordinary sensations do.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 90%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Weber’s Lawmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws (weber’s law) as most sensations do.

Berkovich¹,

Meiran²

2023

Emotion

Self Cite

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show abstract

“…However, other works using conflict tasks with relatively long decision times ( Stahl et al. , 2020 ; Givon et al. , 2022 ) and involving subjective ( Lin et al.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Midfrontal theta as an index of conflict strength in approach–approach vs avoidance–avoidance conflicts

Levy

Enisman

Kleiman

2023

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience

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The seminal theory of motivational conflicts distinguishes between Approach-Approach conflicts, in which a decision is made between desirable alternatives, and Avoidance-Avoidance conflicts, in which a decision is made between undesirable alternatives. The behavioral differences between Approach-Approach and Avoidance-Avoidance conflicts are well documented: both Lewin’s and Miller’s original conceptualization, as well as abundant empirical research that followed, showed that Avoidance-Avoidance conflicts are more difficult to resolve than Approach-Approach ones. However, there is little to no research looking into the neural underpinnings of the differences between the two conflict types. Here, we show that midfrontal theta, an established neural marker of conflict, distinguished between the two conflict types such that midfrontal theta power was higher in Avoidance-Avoidance conflicts than in Approach-Approach conflicts. We further demonstrate that higher midfrontal theta power was associated with shorter decision times on a single trial basis, indicating that midfrontal theta played a role in promoting successful controlled behavior. Taken together, our results show that Approach-Approach and Avoidance-Avoidance conflicts are distinguishable on the neural level. The implications of these results go beyond motivational conflicts, as they establish midfrontal theta as a measure of continuous degree of conflict in subjective decisions.

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“…In studies of exteroceptions such as the above example, experimenters can easily manipulate visual motion direction and ask participants to make a perceptual judgment followed by a confidence rating. Emotional experience, by contrast, is subjective and cannot be captured without a subjective report 17 . Therefore, establishing a method to access the reference (i.e., the ground truth) for emotional judgment is a prerequisite to quantifying meta-emotion.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Exploring quantitative measures in metacognition of emotion

Lee,

Liu,

Chen

et al. 2024

Sci Rep

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Metacognition of emotion (meta-emotion) refers to the ability to evaluate and identify one’s emotional feelings. No previous study has defined and measured this construct through objective and quantitative procedures. We established a reliable method to measure meta-emotion. With a two-interval forced-choice procedure, participants selected which of two pictures elicited stronger positive emotion; via the Law of Comparative Judgment, their responses were used to compute individual psychological distances for the emotional responses triggered by the pictures. Then, participants were asked to judge whether a pre-exposed picture induced a stronger positive emotion than the median of that elicited by the whole picture set, followed by a confidence rating. By utilizing each individual’s psychological distance, the correctness of a participant’s emotional experience was quantified by dʹ, and meta-emotion was quantified using meta-dʹ, M-ratio, and M-diff as indices of metacognitive sensitivity and efficiency based on Signal-Detection Theory. Test–retest reliabilities, validated by Spearman correlation, were observed in meta-dʹ, M-ratio, and marginally with M-diff, suggesting the stability of meta-emotion in the current design. This study unveils a validated procedure to quantify meta-emotion, extendable for assessing metacognition of other subjective feelings. Nevertheless, caution is warranted in interpretation, as the measured processes may be influenced by non-metacognitive factors.

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Can Feelings “Feel” Wrong? Similarities Between Counter-Normative Emotion Reports and Perceptual Errors

Cited by 7 publications

References 27 publications

Pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws (weber’s law) as most sensations do.

Pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws (weber’s law) as most sensations do.

Midfrontal theta as an index of conflict strength in approach–approach vs avoidance–avoidance conflicts

Exploring quantitative measures in metacognition of emotion

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