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

Abstract

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.

Both pleasant and unpleasant emotional feelings follow Weber’s law but it depends how you ask.

“…Adapted from "Pleasant Emotional Feelings Follow One of the Most Basic Psychophysical Laws (Weber's Law) as Most Sensations Do," by R. Berkovich and N. Meiran, 2023, Emotion, 23(5) we were able to draw from the model both the intensity and the uncertainty measure of the emotional experience. Berkovich and Meiran (2023) predicted that both pleasant and unpleasant emotions would obey Weber's Law, but contrary to our predictions, Weber's Law was found only for pleasantness. Specifically, it was found that the uncertainty about pleasant emotional feeling increased with pleasant intensity, while uncertainty of unpleasant emotional feeling increased with pleasantness instead of increasing with unpleasantness.…”

“…The results in the "negative" group were in opposite direction to our prediction and to Berkovich and Meiran's (2023) results. These results seem to suggest that which, pleasant or unpleasant obeys Weber's Law depends on how we instruct participants to report.…”

“…It is important to note that even though we modeled the parameters for each category separately, the priors were equal between categories, meaning that if we find a difference between parameters in the posteriors, this cannot be a result of the priors. For more information regarding this method, see Berkovich and Meiran (2023) and the online supplemental materials.…”

“…There is evidence supporting the perceptual theory (Calvo & Avero, 2009; Givon et al, 2020; Karmon-Presser et al, 2018; Moors, 2009). Yet, perhaps one of the strongest pieces of evidence supporting this theory is that pleasant emotional feeling follow one of the most basic psychophysical Laws that most sensations follow: Weber’s Law (Berkovich & Meiran, 2023).…”

“…The perceptual theory argues that emotions are a form of perception and reach awareness just like simple sensations. The theory was recently supported by Berkovich and Meiran (2023) showing, using evidence accumulation modeling of pleasantness reports, that pleasant emotional feelings follow one of the most basic psychophysical laws, Weber's Law, as nearly all sensations do. Contrary to predictions, this was true for pleasantness and not for unpleasantness.…”