How Do Emotions Become Conscious Feelings? Insights from Affective Psychophysics

ABSTRACT

Emotions are rapid affective responses to internal or external events, often accompanied by a conscious awareness of one's emotional state. Despite more than a century of research, a fundamental question remains unanswered: how do emotions become conscious and turn into felt experiences? Drawing on William James (1884) and other perceptual theories of emotion, I propose that emotional awareness can be understood as a perceptual-like process. If emotional experience is indeed perception-like, does it follow the same fundamental laws that govern sensory perception? To investigate this possibility, I adopt an affective psychophysics approach, applying principles and methods from traditional psychophysics to the study of emotional experience. Specifically, I examine whether emotional experience follows Weber's law, a fundamental psychophysical principle stating that the just-noticeable difference in stimulus intensity is proportional to the initial stimulus intensity. I demonstrate that this law holds for both pleasant and unpleasant emotional experiences, suggesting that emotional experience shares fundamental properties with sensory perception and providing empirical support for the perceptual theory of emotion. Beyond supporting perceptual theories of emotion, these findings reveal a key property of emotional experience: our ability to detect changes in emotional intensity decreases as intensity increases. This principle may have broader implications for understanding emotion regulation and individual and social well-being.