Ways of experiencing perceived emotions

Chapter 2 provided an account of our two capacities for perceiving emotion in the world, and some illustrations of experiences involving both a perception of emotion and the perceiver's emotional economy as that was described in Chapter 1. We are now ready to analyse the nature of these experiences. One means of analysing them, an approach that we shall pursue in this chapter, involves studying the different ways in which the perceived emotion can interact with the perceiver's own emotion. Such an approach, we shall see, reveals three distinct kinds of interaction.

It is well to begin with a disclaimer. This chapter is not a catalogue of all the ways in which we can become aware of the presence of emotion in the world. We have investigated two perceptual capacities through which we might become aware of emotion in the world, but this says nothing about other means through which we can infer the presence of emotion without actually perceiving it. Neither is it an account of all the ways in which the world around us can arouse our emotions. We need not perceive emotion in the world in order for the world to affect us emotionally: a judgement about the world might arouse an emotion without involving any perception of emotion in the world. For good measure, we should also note that it is not concerned with the ways in which a perceiver's emotions might affect his perception of the world, or how our perception of the world might affect the formation of our emotions. Those are matters for the theory of affect.