Crying babies

Emily Dickinson's poem provides us with a vignette of an experience in which the perception of “a certain slant of light” is attended by “heavenly hurt”. We are told the “heavenly hurt” is an “internal difference”, a modification of our psychological condition, which gives the experience its meaning. In the poem, the perception of the emotional tone of the external object brings about the persona's internal change. If interactions between perceptions of emotion in the world and the perceiver's emotion are a feature of our experience of the world, then we should want to know not just what it feels like to have such experiences, but what it means to have them. The poet captures what it feels like for our perception of the emotional tone of some aspect of the external world to engage with our internal emotional condition. This invites the philosopher to ask what it means to have an experience in which the agent's perception of emotion in the external world interacts with the agent's own emotions. Our investigation of the nature of such interactions begins with three illustrations of experiences in which there seems to be an interaction between a perception of emotion and the perceiver's own emotion.