Individual Differences in Emotion Essentialism and Emotional Experience

Individual Differences in Emotion Essentialism and Emotional Experience Student’s Name Institutional Affiliation Individual Differences in Emotion Essentialism and Emotional Experience Affective Realism Affective realism arises when the subject experiences their internal affective state not as a subjective feeling but as a quality of the external world in which the subject is placed. It stems from the analogy that what one sees is what they feel because sensory data from the body and the world is integrated in the brain. That happens because almost all sensory information comes from other neural pathways within the brain, not from the senses. Suppose that after a stressful morning I went into a meeting and my colleague’s facial expression was “neutral.” My affect was high-arousal and unpleasant (negative). After 10 minutes of being there, I perceived him to be “hostile” or “judgmental.” The unpleasantness in my core affect was used by my brain as prior information to forecast. Emotion Essentialism Essentialism is the idea that a category, such as “anger”, must have an underlying essence. It outlines how a biologically or otherwise shared mechanism that identity it as such. One reason why essentialism is so plausible is that it leads people to think that every time they see an instance of one particular category, like anger, they will be seeing the same “real thing”, even if the surface looks different. An example is when I thought my friend’s “sadness” and...