Elsevier

Food Quality and Preference

Volume 92, September 2021, 104178
Food Quality and Preference

Commentary
A fascinating but risky case of reverse inference: From measures to emotions! Sylvain Delplanque & David Sander

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.foodqual.2021.104178Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Discussion of the Component Process Definition of Emotion and Feeling, and its inferences for emotion measurement.

  • Quality and intensity of emotions can’t be predicted from a single neurophysiological parameter.

  • There’s more to emotion that the subjectively experienced feeling.

  • There’s no single objective or subjective measure that captures an instance of emotion holistically and in its entirety.

Abstract

Based on Klaus Scherer’s Component Process Definition of Emotion and Feeling, Delplanque & Sander's opinion piece describes the various components of the Scherer model and why any inferences drawn regarding the quality and intensity of an instance of emotion that are based solely on a single component of the model (i.e. by making a reverse inference) are likely to be fallacious. This commentary reviews some of the opinions expressed by Delplanque & Sander and considers the implications of what they describe as the ‘reverse inference fallacy’, in the context of academic and commercial emotion measurement. Beyond this, two important conclusions may be drawn: Emotion is more than the subjectively experienced feeling associated with the instance of emotion. There’s no single objective or subjective measure that captures an instance of emotion holistically and in its entirety.

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