Emotion, Affect, and Mood in Social Judgments

Abstract We first outline researchers' different implicit philosophical positions on the issue of the relation between language and emotion. Does language accurately describe emotion? Influence emotion? Constitute emotion? Or does everyday language conceal and obscure emotion? One position, that we call “ontological realism” assumes that emotions are pre‐existing entities and words such as “anger” or “sadness” are simply labels for these entities. A second position, that we call Nominalism, assumes that emotion and language about emotion are a same cultural product. A third position, that we call Conceptualism, assumes that emotions are pre‐existing entities but words like “anger” or “sadness” are concepts rather than labels for these entities. A fourth position, that we call Formalism, assumes that language about emotion consists of some universal semantic primitives. An alternative to “emotion” is “affect”, a concept that is mostly related to the pleasure‐arousal theory of emotion but has also been independently developed as a concept with broad applications in social psychology. In this chapter affect is considered as the basic, elemental component of emotion in an emerging paradigm that does not relegate emotion to a particular philosophical position. This paradigm includes various psychological mechanisms—including attribution, automatic and controlled processing, affect as information, appraisal, and core affect—that underlie specific emotional episodes.