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Abstract
In this article, I introduce an emotion paradox: People believe that they know an
emotion when they see it, and as a consequence assume that emotions are discrete events
that can be recognized with some degree of accuracy, but scientists have yet to produce
a set of clear and consistent criteria for indicating when an emotion is present and
when it is not. I propose one solution to this paradox: People experience an emotion
when they conceptualize an instance of affective feeling. In this view, the experience
of emotion is an act of categorization, guided by embodied knowledge about emotion.
The result is a model of emotion experience that has much in common with the social
psychological literature on person perception and with literature on embodied conceptual
knowledge as it has recently been applied to social psychology.