Emotional Granularity is Associated with Daily Experiential Diversity

Beyond Linguistic Relativity, Emotion Concepts Illustrate How Meaning is Contextually and Individually Variable

Kemmerer describes grounded accounts of cognition and, using crosslinguistic diversity across conceptual domains, argues that these accounts entail linguistic relativity. In this comment, I extend Kemmerer's position to the domain of emotion. Emotion concepts exemplify characteristics highlighted by grounded accounts of cognition and differ by culture and language. Recent research further demonstrates considerable situation- and person-specific differences. Based on this evidence, I argue that emotion concepts carry unique implications for variation in meaning and experience, entailing a relativity that is contextual and individual in addition to linguistic. I conclude by considering what such pervasive relativity means for interpersonal understanding.

Multimodal, Idiographic Ambulatory Sensing Will Transform our Understanding of Emotion

Emotions are inherently complex - situated inside the brain while being influenced by conditions inside the body and outside in the world - resulting in substantial variation in experience. Most studies, however, are not designed to sufficiently sample this variation. In this paper, we discuss what could be discovered if emotion were systematically studied within persons 'in the wild', using biologically-triggered experience sampling: a multimodal and deeply idiographic approach to ambulatory sensing that links body and mind across contexts and over time. We outline the rationale for this approach, discuss challenges to its implementation and widespread adoption, and set out opportunities for innovation afforded by emerging technologies. Implementing these innovations will enrich method and theory at the frontier of affective science, propelling the contextually situated study of emotion into the future.