Mixed Emotions: Toward a Phenomenology of Blended and Multiple Feelings

Heavey, Christopher L.; Lefforge, Noelle L.; Lapping-Carr, Leiszle; Hurlburt, Russell T.

doi:10.1177/1754073916639661

Cited by 32 publications

(31 citation statements)

References 22 publications

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“…Even so, all self-report measures have limitations and the strengths of some of the measures that have yielded evidence for mixed emotions of happiness and sadness may not completely overcome the limitations of others. Consider how much more of the richness of pristine emotional experience can be gleaned from qualitative approaches like descriptive experience sampling (Heavey, Hurlburt, & Lefforge, 2012; Heavey, Lefforge, Lapping-Carr, & Hurlburt, 2017) than from Larsen and McGraw’s (2011) button press task. Though we must beware of venturing even further from pristine emotional experience by abandoning self-reports altogether (see Heavey et al, 2017), I believe that much can be learned by supplementing self-report measures with indirect measures of emotion, which refer broadly to measures in which participants do not directly answer questions about their emotional experience.…”

Section: Beyond Direct Measures Of Emotional Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Holes in the Case for Mixed Emotions

Larsen

2017

Emotion Review

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There is considerable debate about whether we can ever experience an emotion without being aware of it (Winkielman & Berridge, 2004), but I would like to suggest that people are never aware of experiencing hubristic pride. What we experience at the time is confidence. Some 15 years ago, I walked into my dissertation defense confident that people can feel happy and sad at the same time and armed with evidence from several studies. This was noteworthy because such philosophers as Socrates (Plato, 1975) and Hume (1739/2000) had speculated about mixed emotions and early psychologists had debated about mixed emotions (e.g., Ebbinghaus, 1902, cited in Wolgemuth, 1919; Wundt, 1896). Moreover, contemporary models of the structure of affect make competing predictions about mixed emotions. Although the committee members Barbara Mellers, Richard Petty, and Philip Tetlock found the studies informative, they also came up with several alternative interpretations for the findings that had not occurred to me. It became clear that what I had taken for confidence had actually been hubris. In the years since, further evidence that people can feel happy and sad at the same time has accumulated as my colleagues, students, and I and other researchers (e.g., Schimmack, 2001) have addressed most of the alternative interpretations that came up. Larsen and McGraw (2014) reviewed this evidence in order to make the case for mixed emotions of happiness and sadness, but here I hope to cross the aisle in order to challenge the existing evidence and speculate about how to provide stronger tests in future research. The Competing Hypotheses The debate is one about the structure of core affect, which Russell and Barrett (1999) defined as the most elementary consciously accessible feelings that people can experience. According to Russell and Barrett's circumplex model, core affect can be described in terms of two psychologically irreducible dimensions. One of these dimensions is the bipolar valence dimension, which ranges from unpleasant states (e.g., sadness) through the neutral point (i.e., no valence) to pleasant states (e.g., happiness). If valence is irreducible (see Barrett & Bliss-Moreau, 2009), happiness and sadness should be mutually exclusive (Russell & Carroll, 1999). In contrast to this bipolarity hypothesis, the evaluative space model (Cacioppo & Berntson, 1994) contends that the positive and negative affective substrates underlying the bipolar valence dimension are separable, which gives rise to the bivariate hypothesis, which holds that happiness and sadness can co-occur. Note that the bipolarity hypothesis does not state that all opposite-valence emotions are mutually exclusive. Watson and Tellegen (1985) highlighted the roles of arousal in emotional experience in a model that is similar to the circumplex model in

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Section: Beyond Direct Measures Of Emotional Experiencementioning

confidence: 99%

Holes in the Case for Mixed Emotions

Larsen

2017

Emotion Review

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“…It allows for expressing both PA and NA using two separate axes. Doing so addresses the evidence that suggested individuals can experience mixed emotional states, such as guilty pleasure [10,37,46,48].…”

Section: Unipolar Valence Model For Emotion Self-reportmentioning

confidence: 99%

Piv

Miri

Flory

Uusberg

et al. 2020

ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact.

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We describe the design and evaluation of PIV, a personalizable and inconspicuous vibrotactile breathing pacer. Given the prevalence and adverse impact of anxiety and anxiety disorders, our goal is to develop a technology that helps people regulate their anxiety through paced breathing. We examined two previously unstudied questions: What is an effective vibrotactile pattern for paced breathing, and where should the tactors be placed on the body to make the pacer most effective? We designed a series of personalized vibrotactile pacing patterns, and evaluated them on three body sites, in terms of self-reported and psychophysiological measures including skin conductance and breath wave parameters. The results show that personalization plays an important role in PIV’s pattern and placement design choices. We concluded that the choice of frequency based, strong-exhale-phased patterns and abdomen placement are appropriate for future studies.

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“…I am using the word feeling to refer to the perceived intensity and quality of the bodily activity that pierces consciousness and emotion to refer to the semantic category that the person uses to interpret a feeling. When feelings with different qualities occur together, individuals combine the names for two emotions and say, for example, that they are happy and sad or ashamed and guilty because there is no name for the blend (Heavey, Lefforge, Lapping-Carr, & Hurlburt, 2017; Larsen, 2017). Some survivors of a natural catastrophe that killed friends or relatives reported feelings that they interpreted as a blend of shame and guilt (Carmassi et al, 2016).…”

Section: Three Critical Conditionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Three Unresolved Issues in Human Morality

Kagan

2018

Perspect Psychol Sci

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This article discusses three major, but related, controversies surrounding the idea of morality. Is the complete pattern of features defining human morality unique to this species? How context dependent are moral beliefs and the emotions that often follow a violation of a moral standard? What developmental sequence establishes a moral code? This essay suggests that human morality rests on a combination of cognitive and emotional processes that are missing from the repertoires of other species. Second, the moral evaluation of every behavior, whether by self or others, depends on the agent, the action, the target of the behavior, and the context. The ontogeny of morality, which begins with processes that apes possess but adds language, inference, shame, and guilt, implies that humans are capable of experiencing blends of thoughts and feelings for which no semantic term exists. As a result, conclusions about a person's moral emotions based only on questionnaires or interviews are limited to this evidence.

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Mixed Emotions: Toward a Phenomenology of Blended and Multiple Feelings

Cited by 32 publications

References 22 publications

Holes in the Case for Mixed Emotions

Holes in the Case for Mixed Emotions

Piv

Three Unresolved Issues in Human Morality

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