This article opens by noting that positive emotions do not fit existing models of emotions. Consequently, a new model is advanced to describe the form and function of a subset of positive emotions, including joy, interest, contentment, and love. This new model posits that these positive emotions serve to broaden an individual's momentary thought-action repertoire, which in turn has the effect of building that individual's physical, intellectual, and social resources. Empirical evidence to support this broaden-and-build model of positive emotions is reviewed, and implications for emotion regulation and health promotion are discussed. Even though research on emotions has this new perspective are featured. My hope is flourished in recent years, investigations that that this article will unlock scientific curiosity expressly target positive emotions remain few about positive emotions, not only to test the and far between. Any review of the psychologi- ideas presented here, but also to build other new cal literature on emotions will show that models that might illuminate the nature and psychologists have typically favored negative value of positive emotions. Psychology sorely emotions in theory building and hypothesis needs more studies on positive emotions, not testing. In so doing, psychologists have inadver- simply to level the uneven knowledge bases tently marginalized the emotions, such as joy, between negative and positive emotions, but interest, contentment, and love, that share a more critically, to guide applications and pleasant subjective feel. To date, then, psycholo- interventions that might improve individual and gy's knowledge base regarding positive emo- collective functioning, psychological welltions is so thin that satisfying answers to the question "What good are positive emotions?" have yet to be articulated. This is unfortunate. being, and physical health. Experiences of positive emotion are central to Why Have Positive Emotions human nature and contribute richly to the quality of people's lives (Diener & Larsen, Been Marginalized? 1993; Myers & Diener, 1995). But how? In At this point, it might be useful to inspect

Ever since William James, psychologists of emotion have tended to view affective states as intrinsically conscious. We argue that nonconscious affect also exists, and focus specifically on the possibility of unconscious ``liking''. We present evidence that positive and negative affective reactions can be elicited subliminally, while a person is completely unaware of any affective reaction at all �in addition to being unaware of the causal stimulus). Despite the absence of any detectable subjective experience of emotion, subliminally induced unconscious ``liking' ' can influence later consumption behaviour. We suggest that unconscious ``liking' ' is mediated by specific subcortical brain systems, such as the nucleus accumbens and its connections. Ordinarily, conscious liking �feelings of pleasure) results from the interaction of separate brain systems of conscious awareness with those core processes of unconscious affect. But under some conditions, activity in brain systems mediating unconscious core ``liking' ' may become decoupled from conscious awareness. The result is a genuinely unconscious emotion. We begin with apologies to William James for having stolen the title of our paper from his classic article, ``What is an emotion' ' �James, 1884). Worse still, by inserting ``unconscious' ' as a modifier, our title distorts his concept of emotion in a way that renders it almost nonsensical. This is because an unconscious emotion was a contradiction in terms, according to James ' �1884) definition. For James, emotion was a conscious experience or subjective feeling

This article develops the hypothesis that intervention strategies that cultivate positive emotions are particularly suited for preventing and treating problems rooted in negative emotions, such as anxiety, depression, aggression, and stressrelated health problems. Fredrickson's (1998) broaden–and–build model of positive emotions provides the foundation for this application. According to this model, the form and function of positive and negative emotions are distinct and complementary. Negative emotions (e.g., fear, anger, and sadness) narrow an individual's momentary thought–action repertoire toward specific actions that served the ancestral function of promoting survival. By contrast, positive emotions (e.g., joy, interest, and contentment) broaden an individual's momentary thought–action repertoire, which in turn can build that individual's enduring personal resources, resources that also served the ancestral function of promoting survival. One implication of the broaden–and–build model is that positive emotions have an undoing effect on negative emotions. By broadening

this article. We are also grateful to Danny Chung, Billy Dilly, Monika Heller, Mareike Messner, and Joachim Vosgerau who served as experimenters. This research was supported by a German Science Foundation grant DFG: BR1722/1-2 given to C. Miguel Brendl; by a National Science Foundation grant SBR-9905013 given to Arthur B. Markman, and by a Transcoop award from the German American Academic Council to both the above authors. It is commonly assumed that an object capable of satisfying a need will be perceived as subjectively more valuable as the need for it intensifies. For example, the more active the need to eat, the more valuable food will become. This outcome could be called a valuation effect. In this article, we suggest a second basic influence of needs on evaluations: that activating a focal need (e.g., to eat) makes objects unrelated to that need (e.g., shampoo) less valuable, an outcome we refer to as the devaluation effect. Two existing studies support the existence of a devaluation effect using manipulations of the need to eat and to smoke, and measuring attractiveness of consumer products and willingness to purchase raffle tickets. Furthermore, the evidence suggests that consumers are not aware of the devaluation effect and its influence on their preferences. In research on decision making, one of the core theoretical constructs relating to preference is utility. Models based on utility assume that people's preferences for an object or its properties depend on the degree to which the object or property can satisfy some active goal. The utility of an object will vary as people s goals relating to that object change in intensity. Thus utility (as well as common sense) is consistent with a valuation relation between goals and choice whereby an object is valued ac...

Abstract—The primate orbitofrontal cortex is a site of convergence of information from primary taste, olfactory and somatosensory cortical areas. We describe the discovery of a population of single neurons in the macaque orbitofrontal cortex that responds to the temperature of a liquid in the mouth. The temperature stimuli consisted of water at 10 °C, 23 °C, 37 °C and 42 °C. Twenty-six of the 1149 neurons analyzed (2.3%) responded to oral temperature. The tuning profiles of the neurons to temperature showed that some of the neurons had graded responses to increasing temperature (27%), others responded to cold (10 °C) stimuli (27%), and others were tuned to temperature (46%). The neuronal responses were also measured to taste stimuli, viscosity stimuli (carboxymethyl-cellulose in the range 1–10,000 cP), and capsaicin (10 �M). Of 70 neurons with responses to any of these stimuli, 7.1 % were unimodal temperature; 11.3 % were temperature and taste-sensitive; 7.1 % were temperature and viscosity-sensitive; and 11.3 % were temperature, taste and viscosity sensitive. Capsaicin activated 15.7 % of the population of responsive neurons tested. These results provide the first evidence of how the temperature of what is in the mouth is represented at the neuronal level in the orbitofrontal cortex and the first evidence for any primate cortical area that in some cases this information converges onto single neurons with inputs produced by other sensory properties of food, including taste and texture. The results provide a basis for understanding how particular combinations of oral temperature, taste, and texture can influence the palatability of foods.

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In this paper we take stock of recent research on how people summarize and evaluate extended experiences. Summary assessments do not simply integrate all the components of the evaluated events, but tend to focus on only a few features (gestalt characteristics). Examples of these defining features include the rate at which the transient state components of the experience become more or less pleasant over its duration, and the intensity of the state at key instances, in particular the most intense (peak) and the final (end) moments. It is not yet sufficiently clear which specific gestalt characteristics dominate summary assessments of experiences, nor how this differs across types of experiences or measurement approaches. To address some of these issues, we describe new research in this area, discuss potential methodological difficulties, and suggest directions for future research.

People’s wanting and liking reactions reflect not only high-level beliefs, but also the operation of rudimentary biopsychological processes. Previous studies suggest that the following wanting and liking processes may be relevant to political behavior: irrational wanting (where wanting is triggered by activation of the brain dopamine system and becomes dissociated from liking); unconscious liking and wanting (where evaluative judgments and behavior are modified without awareness of the eliciting affective stimuli or of the underlying affective response); and fluency-based liking (where preferences are influenced by the ease of stimulus processing). This review suggests how conceptual and methodological tools from affective neuroscience and psychophysiology can refine our understanding of basic affective and motivational processes that shape political attitudes and choices. KEY WORDS: affect, choice, emotion, preference, neuroscience Citizens participate in the political process not only with their heads, but also their hearts. They are either enthusiastic about candidates or disgusted by them, engaged in or indifferent to elected officials ’ decisions, trusting or afraid of the government, passionate about social justice or hateful toward certain groups, hopeful or scared about the future, “mad as hell ” or confident about the economy. Social scientists who appreciate these observations have long been interested in understanding the functions of emotion and motivation in political behavior

Abstract: To answer the question of whether sensory pleasure exists in birds, I trained an African-gray parrot (Psittacus erythacus) named Aristote to speak. Stage 1 of the study consisted in gaining Aristote’s affection. In Stage 2 Aristote was taught to speak, following Irene Pepperberg’s triangular method: another person and I would talk together and look at Aristote only when it used understandable French words. Thus Aristote learned to say a few words for obtaining toys or getting my attention; e.g. “donne bouchon ” (give cork) or “donne gratte ” (give scratch/tickle), with the appropriate reward. In Stage 3, the word bon (good) was added to the short list of words used by Aristote. I said “bon ” when giving Aristote the stimuli it requested and which would, presumably, be pleasurable; e.g. gratte bon. Aristote started to use short sentences such as “yaourt bon ” (good yogurt). Eventually, Aristote transferred the word bon to new stimuli such as raisin (grape), an association I myself had never made. Such a use of vocabulary, and moreover its transfer, likely shows that this bird experienced sensory pleasure.

Neural substrates for conditioned taste aversion in the rat